THE EYES OF THE WORLD
If there were a hundred men in a crowd and Chester K. Pilkins was there
he would be the hundredth man. I like that introduction. If I wrote a
book about him I doubt whether I could sum up Mr. Pilkins' personality
more completely than already I have done in this the first sentence of
this the first paragraph of my tale. Nevertheless, I shall try.
Card-indexing him, so to speak, filling in the dotted lines after the
fashion pursued by a candidate for admission to Who's Whosoever Can, we
attain this result: Name? Chester K(irkham) Pilkins; born? certainly;
parentage? one father and one mother; lives? only in a way of speaking;
married? extensively so; business? better than it was during the panic
but not so good as it might be; recreations? reading, writing,
arithmetic and the comic supplements; clubs? Prospect Slope Pressing,
Montauk Chess, Checkers and Whist, King's County Civic Reform and
Improvement; religion? twice on Sunday, rarely on week-days; politics?
whatever is the rule; height? sub-average; weight? less than
sub-average; hair? same as eyes; eyes? same as hair; complexion?
variable, but inclining to be fair, and warmer in moments of
embarrassment; special distinguishing characteristics? Oh, say, what's
the use?
This would apply to Chester K. Pilkins as once he was, not as now he is.
For there has been a change. As will develop. But at the time when we
begin our study of him Mr. Pilkins resided in a simple and
unostentatious manner in Brooklyn, N. Y., on one of those streets which
are named for semi-tropical flowering shrubs for the same reason that
hunting dogs are named for Greek goddesses and race horses for United
States senators and tramp steamers for estimable maiden ladies. In
a small, neat house, almost entirely surrounded by rubber plants, he
lived with his wife, Mrs. Gertrude Maud Pilkins. This phraseology is
by deliberate intent. His wife did not live with him. He lived with her.
To have referred to this lady as his better half would be dealing in
improper fractions. At the very lowest computation possible, she was his
better eight-tenths.
By profession he was an expert bookkeeper, in the employ of a firm doing
a large bond and stock brokerage business on the sinful or Manhattan
shore of the East River. The tragedy and the comedy, the sordid romance
and the petty pathos of Wall Street rolled in an unheeded torrent over
his head as he, submerged deep in the pages of his ledgers, sat all day
long dotting his _i_'s and crossing his _t_'s, adding his columns and
finding his totals. Sometimes of evenings he stayed on to do special
accounting jobs for smaller concerns in need of his professional
services.
Otherwise, when five o'clock came he took off his little green-baize
apron, his green eyeshade and his black calico sleeve protectors,
slipped on his detachable cuffs, his hat and his coat, took his umbrella
in hand, and leaving New York and its wicked, wanton ways behind him, he
joined with half a million other struggling human molecules in the
evening bridge crush--that same bridge crush of which the metropolis is
so justly ashamed and so properly proud--and was presently at home in
Brooklyn, which is a peaceful country landscape, pastoral in all its
instincts, but grown up quite thickly with brick and mortar. There he
gave his evenings to the society of his wife, to the chess problems
printed from time to time in the _Eagle_, and to reading his
encyclopedia, which had been purchased on the instalment plan, at the
rate of so much down, so much a week. It seemed probable that Mr.
Pilkins would finish reading his encyclopedia before he finished paying
for it, which is more than most of us can say, however literary our
aims and aspirations. He liked to pick up a volume for half an hour or
so immediately prior to his retiring. He said it rested him. He had got
as far as the middle of the very interesting one named _Gib to Jibe_.
Once in a while, though, the Pilkinses went out in society. That is to
say, Mrs. Pilkins went, and took Mr. Pilkins with her.
I would not have you believe from all this that Mr. Pilkins entertained
no views of his own on current topics. His convictions upon certain
heads were most definite and settled, and on favourable occasions openly
he voiced them. Among other things he believed that if somebody would
only start up an old-time minstrel show, such as we used to see when we
were boys, it would make a fortune; that the newspapers printed a pack
of lies every day because they had to have something to fill up their
columns; that there was a great deal of grafting going on and something
should be done about it right away; that the winters were changing,
because of the Gulf Stream or something, so you couldn't depend on the
climate any more; that owing to the high cost of living it was
practically impossible to get a good sixty-cent table-d'hôte dinner
nowadays; and that Mrs. Pilkins was in many respects a very unusual
woman.
She was all of that. Get Gertrude Maud. She looms before us, large and
full of figure, majestic of bearing and fair of face, her general
aspect indeed a very general aspect. She was competent by inheritance
and domineering by instinct. It was common talk in the circle in which
Gertrude Maud moved, towing Chester behind her, that she had Bohemian
leanings. True, she had never smoked a cigarette in all her blameless
life, nor touched her lips to strong drink; nor yet had she patronised
studio teas and attended the indoor anarchistic revels of the
parlour-radicals established in the neighbourhood of Washington Square.
Rather she betrayed her Bohemian trend by what she wore than by what she
did.
She was addicted to festooning about her neck large polished beads of
the more popular hard woods and upon her bosom plaquelike articles which
apparently had originated with a skilled cabinetmaker and joiner. Her
wrists and her forearms she adorned with art-work bracelets of hammered
metals set with large muddy-looking stones--almost anything that would
look well in a collection of geological specimens was, in the eyes of
Gertrude Maud, jewelry. Her costumes of state, displayed in connection
with these ornamentations culled from the vegetable and mineral
kingdoms, were cut square in the neck and extended straight up and down,
being ungirthed at the waistline but set off with red and blue edgings,
after the style of fancy tea towels. As her woman friends often remarked
in tones of admiration, she had never worn stays in her life, and yet
just look what a figure she had! Sometimes, the weather being
favourable, she wore sandals.
Excelling, as she did, in the social graces, Mrs. Pilkins was greatly in
demand for neighbourhood parties. She was an amateur palmist of great
note. At a suitable time in the course of the evening's festivities she
would possess herself of the left hand of some gentleman or lady
present--usually a gentleman's hand--and holding it palm upward, she
would gently massage its surface and then begin uttering little gasping
sounds betokening intense surprise and gratification.
"Do you know, really," she would say when she had in part recovered,
such being the regular formula, "I don't believe in all my experience I
hardly ever saw such an interesting hand?"
Peering close and ever closer she would trace out the past, the present
and the future, seeing strange influences coming into the other's life,
and long journeys and dark strangers; and presently, with a startled
cry, she would pounce upon the heart line, and then, believe me, she
would find out things worth telling! And if the owner of the captive
hand chanced to be a young man whose life was so exemplary as to be
downright painful, he would endeavour by his air to convey the
impression that the fence round the South Flatbush Young Ladies'
Seminary had been builded extra high and extra strong especially on his
dangerous account. Hardly could the rest wait to have Mrs. Pilkins read
their palms too. And while this went on, Mr. Pilkins would be hanging
about on the outskirts of the group, feeling very null and void. Really
his only excuse for being there at all was that Gertrude Maud needed
some one to get her rubbers off and on and to bring her home.
Naturally, as one adept in the divination of the dearest characteristics
of men and women, and also because she was a wife and subject to the
common delusions of wives as a class, Mrs. Pilkins felt she knew
Chester--felt she could read him like a book. This only goes to show how
wrong a woman and a wife can be. For behind the mild and pinkish mask
which he showed to her and to creation at large Chester Pilkins nursed
unsuspected ambitions, undreamed-of dreams. He hankered with a hankering
which was almost a pain to stand for once anyhow before the eyes of the
world. Within him a secret fire seethed; he ached and glowed with it,
and yet none knew of it. He would have died in his tracks before he
voiced his burning desire to any human being, yet constantly it abode
with him. He was tired--oh, so tired--of being merely one of the six
millions. He craved to be one among the six millions. He peaked and he
pined with it.
This longing is commoner probably among city dwellers than among those
who live in the smaller settlements of men, and for that there is, as
I believe, a good and sufficient reason. In the little community there
are no nobodies. Anybody is somebody. But where the multitude is
close-packed, nearly anybody is everybody and nearly everybody is
anybody. The greater the number within a given space, the fewer are
there available for purposes of pomp, prominence and publicity. A few
stand out above the ruck; the rest make up the unconsidered mass--mute,
inglorious and, except briefly in the census figures, unsung. And
Chester K. Pilkins yearned to stand out.
Twice in his life he had thought he was about to attain conspicuousness
and be pointed out by men as something other than Mrs. Chester K.
Pilkins' husband. They were narrow escapes, both of them. Because each
was such a narrow escape, that made the disappointment all the greater.
Once on a rainy, blowy evening, when the narrow gore of Nassau Street
where it debouches into Park Row was a mushroom bed of wet, black
umbrella tops and the bridge crush at the mouth of the Bridge took on an
added frenzy, a taxicab, driven at most unlawful speed, bored through
the fringes of the press, knocked a man galley west, and, never checking
its gait, fled into the shelter of the L pillars toward Chatham Square
and was gone from sight before more than six or eight spectators could
get its license numbers wrong.
The man was Chester K. Pilkins. He was butted violently from behind as
he fought his way across the asphalt, with his collar turned up against
the wet gusts and his thoughts intent on getting a seat aboard the
transpontine car. He never had gotten a seat aboard it yet, but there
was no telling when he might. Immediately on being struck he was
projected some yards through space in a galley-westerly direction, and
when he struck he rolled over and over in the mud, greatly to the
detriment of a neat black overcoat buttoning under a fly front, and with
silk facings upon the lapels, then in its third season of service. Kind
hands--very many of them--lifted him up from where he lay with a long
scratch on his nose and a passing delusion within his brain that he had
taken a long rough trip somewhere and was coming back by slow stages.
Sympathetic persons, about equally divided in their opinion as to
whether most of his bones were or were not broken, bore him with all
gentleness into the drug store in the World Building, propped him
against a show case, and packed about him in a dense mass, those good
Samaritans in the front row calling upon those behind them to stand
back, in heaven's name, and give him a little air. There a kindly
disposed bootblack brushed him off, and a soda-water clerk offered him
malted milk with a dash of nerve tonic in it, and a policeman, using a
stubby lead pencil, took down his name and address in a little red book,
and a blithe young interne came on the tail of an ambulance with a kit
of surgical tools in his hand, and presently departed, obviously
disappointed to find there was no need of a capital operation to be
performed forthwith upon the spot; and, altogether, the victim was made
much of. A little later, somewhat shaken and sore but not materially
damaged, he rode home--standing up and swaying in the aisle, as was
customary--holding with one hand to a strap and with the other at
intervals caressing his wounded nose.
Next morning he bought all the morning papers printed in English--there
are still a considerable number of morning papers in Greater New York
that are printed in English--and with a queer, strangled little beat of
anticipatory pride in his throat-pulse he searched assiduously through
all of them, page by page and heading by heading, for the account of his
accident. He regarded that accident in a proprietary sense. If it wasn't
his, whose then was it? Only one paper out of all the lot had seen fit
to mention the affair. In a column captioned Small Brevities he found at
last a single, miserable, puny six-line paragraph to the effect that a
pedestrian--pedestrian, mind you!--giving his name as Charles Piffles,
had been knocked down by an unidentified automobile, and after having
been given first-aid treatment by Patrolman Roger P. Dugan, of the
Peck's Slip Station, and receiving further attention at the hands of
Ambulance Surgeon Max Loeb, who came from Battery Place Hospital in
response to a call, was able to go to his home, at such and such an
address, borough of Brooklyn. And even the house number as set down was
incorrect. From that hour dated Chester K. Pilkins' firm and bitter
belief in the untrustworthiness of the metropolitan press.
The other time was when he was drawn on a panel for jury duty in the
trial of a very fashionable and influential murderer. A hundred
householders were netted in that venire, and of the number I daresay
Chester Pilkins was the hundredth. With the ninety and nine others he
reported at a given hour at a given courtroom, and there for two days he
waited while slowly the yawning jury box filled with retired real-estate
dealers and jobbers in white goods. Finally his own name was reached and
the clerk called it out loudly and clearly. Shaking the least bit in his
knees and gulping hard to keep his Adam's apple inside his collar, Mr.
Pilkins took the stand and nervously pledged himself truthfully to
answer all such questions as might be put to him touching on his
qualifications for service in the case now on trial. He did answer them
truthfully; more than that, he answered them satisfactorily. He had no
conscientious scruples against the infliction of capital punishment for
the crime of murder in the first degree. From his readings of the public
prints he had formed no set and definite opinion as to the guilt or
innocence of the accused. He was not personally acquainted with the
deceased, with the prisoner at the bar, with the attorneys upon either
side, with the officers who had made the arrest, with the coroner's
physician who had conducted the autopsy, or with any one connected in
any way with the case. He professed himself as willing to be guided by
His Honour on the bench in all matters pertaining to the laws of
evidence, while exclusively reserving the right to be his own judge of
the weight and value of the testimony itself. So far, so good.
The district attorney nodded briefly. The lawyers for the murderer,
confabbing with their heads together, gave no sign of demur. The
presiding justice, a large man, heavily moustached and with more chins
than he could possibly need, who had been taking a light nap, was
aroused by the hush which now befell and sat up, rustling in his black
silk sleeping gown.
Behind Chester Pilkins' waistcoat Chester Pilkins' heart gave a little
gratified jump. He was about to be accepted; he would be in the papers.
He saw a sketch artist, who sat just beyond the rail, squint at him from
under his eyebrows and lower a pencil to a scratch pad which was poised
upon a right kneecap. A picture would be published. What mattered it
though this picture would purely look excessively unlike him? Would not
the portrait be suitably labelled? Mentally he visualised the precious
lines:
Juror No. 9--Chester K. Pilkins, No. 373 Japonica Avenue; certified
accountant; 39; married; no children.
From somewhere back of the moustache His Honour's voice was heard
rumbling forth hoarsely:
"If-no-objections-from-either-side-let-juror-be-sworn."
At Mr. Pilkins' side appeared a court functionary bearing a grimed and
venerable volume containing many great truths upon its insides and many
hungry germs upon its outside. Mr. Pilkins arose to his feet and
stretched forth a slightly tremulous hand to rest it upon The Book. In
this moment he endeavoured to appear in every outward aspect the zealous
citizen, inspired solely by a sense of his obligations to himself and to
the state. A sort of Old Roman pose it was. And in that same moment the
blow fell and the alabaster vase was shattered.
Senior counsel for the defence--the one with the long frock coat and the
sobbing catch in his voice--bobbed up from where he sat.
"Defence-excuses-this-gentleman," he grunted, all in one word, and sat
down again.
The artist scratched out a shadowy outline of the lobe of Mr. Pilkins'
left ear and the southeastern slope of his skull--for already this
talented draftsman had progressed thus far with the portrait--and in
less than no time our Mr. Pilkins, surcharged now with a sense of injury
and vaguely feeling that somehow his personal honour had been impugned,
was being waved away from the stand to make room for a smallish, darkish
gentleman of a Semitic aspect. With his thoughts in such turmoil that he
forgot to take with him the bone-handled umbrella which he had carried
for two years and better, he left the courtroom.
Really, though, he never had a chance. The defence had expended upon him
one of its dwindling store of peremptory challenges because in the
moment of being sworn he appeared a person of so stern and
uncompromising an exterior. "Besides," the senior counsel had whispered
hurriedly to his associates--"besides, he seems so blamed anxious to
serve. Bad sign--better let him go." And so they let him go. But, on the
other hand, had he worn a look less determined the district attorney
would have challenged him on the suspicion of being too kind-hearted.
The jury system is a priceless heritage of our forefathers, and one of
the safeguards of our liberties, but we do things with it of which I
sometimes think the forefathers never dreamed.
Thus, with its periods of hopefulness and its periods of despairing,
life for our hero rolled on after the placid fashion of bucolic
Brooklyn, adrowse among its mortary dells and its masonry dingles, until
there came the year 1915 A. D. and of the Constitution of the United
States the One Hundred and I forget which. For long the Pilkinses had
been saving up to take a trip to Europe, Chester particularly desiring
to view the Gothic cathedrals of the Continent, about which Volume _Cad
to Eve_ of his encyclopedia discoursed at great length and most
entertainingly. For her part, Mrs. Chester intended to mingle in the gay
life of the artistic set of the Latin Quarter, and then come home and
tell about it.
By the summer of 1914 there was laid by a sum sufficient to pay all
proper costs of the tour. And then, with unpardonable inconsiderateness,
this war had to go and break out. The war disagreeably continuing,
Europe was quite out of the question. If Europe must have a war it
couldn't have the Pilkinses. So in the early spring of the following
year, the combined thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Pilkins turned longingly
westward. Mr. Pilkins had never been beyond Buffalo but once; that was
when, on their wedding tour, they went to Niagara Falls. Mrs. Pilkins
once had visited her married sister residing in Xenia, Ohio. Such
portion of the Great West as lay beyond Xenia was to her as a folded
scroll. So Westward Ho! it was.
I deem it to have been eminently characteristic of Chester that he spent
three evenings preparing, with the aid of timetables, descriptive
folders furnished by a genial and accommodating ticket agency and a
condensed hotel directory, a complete schedule of their projected
itinerary, including the times of arrivals and departures of trains,
stop-overs, connections, cab and bus fares, hotel rates, baggage
regulations, and what not. Opposite the name of one junction town beyond
the Rockies he even set down a marginal note: "At this point see Great
American Desert."
Leaving Chicago on the second lap of the outbound half of the momentous
journey, they took a section in a sleeping car named appropriately for a
Hindu deity. For once in his life Chester was above his wife, where he
could look down upon her. But that was in the nighttime, when he lodged
in the upper. Daytimes he reverted to his original and regular state,
becoming again one of the submerged tenth of one-tenth. In the dining
car Mrs. Pilkins selected the dishes and gave the orders, and he,
submissive as the tapeworm, ate of what was put before him, asking no
questions. In the club car, among fellow travellers of his own sex, he
was as one set apart. They talked over him and round him and if needs be
through him to one another; and when, essaying to be heard upon the
topics of the day, then under discussion, he lifted up his voice some
individual of a more commanding personality--the member of the
legislature from Michigan or the leading osteopath of Council
Bluffs--would lift his voice yet higher, wiping him out as completely
as though he had been a naught done in smudged chalk upon a blackboard.
After all, life in the free and boundless West threatened to become for
him what life in cribbed, cabined and confined Brooklyn had been; this
was the distressing reflection which frequently recurred to him as he
retired all squelched and muted from the unequal struggle, and it made
his thoughts dark with melancholy. Was there in all this wide continent
no room for true worth when habited in native modesty?
In time they reached a certain distinguished city of the Coast, nestling
amid its everlasting verdure and real-estate boomers. But in the
rainless season the verdure shows an inclination to dry up. However,
this was in the verdant springtime, when Nature everywhere, and
especially in California, is gladsome and all-luxuriant. From the
station a bus carried them through thriving suburbs to a large tourist
hotel built Spanish Mission style and run American plan. The young man
behind the clerk's desk took one prognostic look at Chester as Chester
registered, and reached for a certain key, but while in the act of so
doing caught a better glimpse of Mrs. Chester, and, changing his mind,
gave them a very much better room at the same price. There was something
about Mrs. Pilkins.
That evening, entering the dining-room, which was a great, soft-pine
Sahara of a place dotted at regular intervals with circular oases
called tables, each flowing with ice water and abounding in celery, in
the native ripe olives shining in their own oils, and in yellow poppy
blossoms in vases, the Pilkinses instantly and intuitively discovered
that they had been ushered into a circle new to them. Some of the diners
in sight were plainly, like themselves, tourists, transients,
fly-by-night sightseers from the East, here to-day and going to-morrow.
But sundry others present, being those who had the look about them of
regular guests, were somehow different. Without being told, the
newcomers at once divined that they were in a haunt of the
moving-picture folk, and also by the same processes of instinctive
discernment were informed of another thing: As between the actors newly
recruited from that realm of art which persons of a reminiscent turn of
mind are beginning to speak of as the spoken drama, and the actors who
had been bred up and developed by its one-time little half-sister, the
moving-picture game, a classifying and separating distinction existed.
It was a distinction not definable in words, perhaps; nevertheless, it
was as apparent there in that dining-room as elsewhere. You know how the
thing goes in other lines of allied industries? Take two agents now--a
road agent, let us say, and a book agent. Both are agents; both belong
to the predatory group; both ply their trades upon the highway with
utter strangers for their chosen prey; and yet in the first flash we
can tell a book agent from a road agent, and vice versa. So it was with
these ladies and gentlemen upon whom Chester K. Pilkins and wife--beg
pardon, Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins and husband--now gazed.
At the table to which a post-graduate head-waitress escorted them and
there surrendered them into the temporary keeping of a sophomore
side-waitress there sat, in a dinner coat, a young man of most
personable appearance and address, with whom, as speedily developed, it
was not hard to become acquainted, but, on the contrary, easy. Almost as
soon as the Pilkinses were seated he broke through the film ice of
formality by remarking that Southern California was, on the whole, a
wonderful country, was it not? Speaking as one, or as one and a
fractional part of another, they agreed with him. Did it not possess a
wonderful climate? It did. And so on and so forth. You know how one of
these conversations grows, expands and progresses.
Presently there were mutual introductions across the fronded celery and
the self-lubricating ripe olive. This accomplished, Mr. Pilkins was upon
the point of stating that he was in the accounting line, when their new
acquaintance, evidently holding such a detail to be of no great
consequence, broke in upon him with a politely murmured "Excuse me" and
proceeded to speak of a vastly more interesting subject. His name, as
they already knew, was Mr. Royal Harcourt. He was of the theatrical
profession, a thing they already had guessed. He told them more--much
more.
It would seem that for long he had withstood the blandishments and
importunities of the moving-picture producers, standing, as it were,
aloof from them and all their kind, holding ever that the true artist
should remain ever the true artist, no matter how great the financial
temptation to enter the domain of the silent play might be. But since so
many of equal importance in the profession had gone into the
pictures--and besides, after all was said and done, did not the pictures
cater educationally to a great number of doubtlessly worthy persons
whose opportunity for acquaintance with the best work of the legitimate
stage was necessarily limited and curtailed?--well, any way, to make a
long story no longer, he, Mr. Royal Harcourt, had gone into the pictures
himself, and here he was. Taking it that he had been appealed to, Mr.
Pilkins nodded in affirmation of the wisdom of the step, and started to
speak. "Excuse me, please," said Mr. Harcourt courteously but firmly.
Plainly Mr. Harcourt was not yet done. He resumed. One who had a
following might always return to the legitimate finding that following
unimpaired. Meanwhile, the picture business provided reasonably pleasant
employment at a most attractive remuneration.
"So, as I said just now," went on Mr. Harcourt, "here I am and here you
find me. I may tell you that I am specially engaged for the filming of
that popular play, The Prince of the Desert, which the Ziegler Company
is now making here at its studios. My honorarium--this, of course, is in
confidence--my honorarium for this is eight hundred dollars a week." He
glanced at their faces. "In fact, strictly between ourselves, nine
hundred and fifty." And with a polished finger nail Mr. Harcourt flicked
an imaginary bit of fluff from a fluffless coat lapel.
Awe descended upon the respective souls of his listeners, and there
lingered.
"And of course for that--that figure--you play the leading part?" Mrs.
Pilkins put the question almost reverently.
A trace, just a trace, of unconscious bitterness trickled into their
tablemate's voice as he answered:
"No, madam, I could hardly go so far as to say that--hardly so far as to
say that exactly. My good friend, Mr. Basil Derby, has the title rôle.
He originated the part on Broadway--perhaps that explains it. I play the
American newspaper correspondent--a strong part, yet with touches of
pure comedy interspersed in it here and there--a part second only to
that of the star."
"Does he--this Mr. Derby--does he get anything like what you are paid?"
ventured Mr. Pilkins. Surely the Ziegler Company tempted bankruptcy.
"I suspect so, sir, I suspect so."
Mr. Harcourt's tone indicated subtly that this world was as yet by no
means free from injustice.
Before the meal was anywhere near ended--in fact, before they reached
the orange sorbet, coming between the roast beef _au jus_ and the choice
of young chicken with giblet sauce or cold sliced lamb with pickled
beets--the Pilkinses knew a great deal about Mr. Royal Harcourt, and Mr.
Royal Harcourt knew the Pilkinses were good listeners, and not only good
listeners but believing ones as well. So a pleasant hour passed speedily
for all three. There, was an especially pleasant moment just at the
close of the dinner when Mr. Harcourt invited them to accompany him at
ten o'clock on the following morning to the Ziegler studios, and as his
guest to witness the lensing of certain episodes destined to figure in
the completed film drama of The Prince of the Desert. Speaking for both,
Mrs. Pilkins accepted.
"But, Gertrude Maud," murmured Mr. Pilkins doubtfully as the two of them
were leaving the dining-room to hear the orchestra play in the arched
inner garden where the poinsettia waved its fiery bannerets aloft,
reminding one somewhat of the wagging red oriflamme of a kindred member
of the same family--the Irish setter--and the inevitable spoiled
childling of every tourist hotel romped to and fro, whining for pure
joy, making life a curse for its parents and awakening in the hearts of
others reconciling thoughts touching upon the late King Herod, the
bald-headed prophet who called the bears down out of the hills, and the
style of human sacrifices held to be most agreeable to the tastes of the
heathenish god Moloch. "But, Gertrude Maud," he repeated demurringly as
he trailed a pace behind her, seeing she had not heard or seemed not to
have heard. In her course Mrs. Pilkins halted so suddenly that a
double-stranded necklet of small wooden darning eggs of graduated sizes
clinked together smartly.
"Chester," she stated sharply, "don't keep bleating out 'Gertrude Maud'
like that. It annoys me. If you have anything to say, quit mumbling and
say it."
"But, Ger--but, my dear," he corrected himself plaintively, "we were
going to visit the orange groves to-morrow morning. I have already
spoken to the automobile man----"
"Chester," said Mrs. Pilkins, "the orange groves can wait. I understand
they have been here for some time. They will probably last for some time
longer. To-morrow morning at ten o'clock you and I are going with that
nice Mr. Harcourt. It will be an interesting experience and a broadening
one. We are here to be broadened. We will see something very worth
while, I am convinced of it."
Indeed, they began to witness events of an acutely unusual nature before
ten o'clock. As they came out from breakfast there darted down the
lobby stairs at the right a young maiden and a youth, both most
strikingly garbed. The young lady wore a frock of broad white-and-black
stripes clingingly applied to her figure in up-and-down lines. She had a
rounded cheek, a floating pigtail, and very large buckles set upon the
latchets of her twinkling bootees. The youth was habited as a college
boy. At least he wore a Norfolk jacket, a flowing tie of the Windsor,
England, and East Aurora, New York, variety, and trousers which were
much too short for him if they were meant to be long trousers and much
too long for him if they were meant to be short trousers. Hand in hand,
with gladsome outcry, this pair sped through the open doors and vaulted
down the porch steps without, as nimbly as the chamois of the Alpine
steeps, toward a large touring car, wherein sat a waiting chauffeur,
most correctly liveried and goggled.
Close behind them, in ardent pursuit, an elderly, rather obese
gentleman, in white waistcoat, white side whiskers and white
spats--patently a distressed parent--tore into sight, waving his arms
and calling upon the fleeing pair to halt. Yet halted they not. They
whisked into the rear seat of the automobile just as the elderly
gentleman tripped on a crack in the planking of the veranda and was
precipitated headlong into the arms of a fat bellboy who at this exact
moment emerged from behind a pillar. It was a very fat bellboy--one
that could not have weighed an ounce less than two hundred pounds, nor
been an hour less than forty years old--and he was grotesquely comical
in a suit of brass buttons and green cloth incredibly tight for him.
Locked in each other's arms the parent and bellboy rolled down the
steps--bumpety-bump!--and as progressing thus in close communion they
reached the surface of the driveway, a small-town policeman, wearing
long chin whiskers and an enormous tin star, ran forward from nowhere in
particular, stumbled over their entangled forms and fell upon them with
great violence. Then while the three of them squirmed and wriggled there
in a heap, the automobile whirled away with the elopers--it was, of
course, by now quite plain that they must be elopers--casting mocking,
mirthsome glances backward over their diminishing shoulders.
"Slap stick! Rough-house! Cheap stuff! But it goes--somehow it goes. The
public stands for it. It passes one's comprehension." It was Mr. Royal
Harcourt who, standing just behind the Pilkinses, commented in tones of
a severe disparagement. They became cognisant also of a man who had been
stationed in the grass plot facing the hotel, grinding away at a crank
device attached to a large camera. He had now ceased from grinding.
Except for the camera man, the disapproving Mr. Harcourt and themselves,
no one else within sight appeared to take more than a perfunctory
interest in what had just occurred.
"Come with me," bade Mr. Harcourt when the outraged parent, the fat
bellboy and the small-town policeman had picked themselves up, brushed
themselves off and taken themselves away. "You have seen one side of
this great industry. I propose now to introduce you to another side of
it--the artistic side."
He waved his arm in a general direction, and instantly a small
jitneybile detached itself from a flock of jitneybiles stationed
alongside the nearer curbing and came curving up to receive them. This
city, I may add in passing, was the home of the original mother jitney,
and there, in her native habitat, she spawned extensively before she
moved eastward, breeding busily as she went.
To the enlarged eyes of the Pilkinses strange phases of life were
recurringly revealed as the vehicle which their guide had chartered
progressed along the wide suburban street, beneath the shelter of the
pepper trees and the palms. Yet the residential classes living
thereabout appeared to view the things which transpired with a languid,
not to say a bored, manner; and as for Mr. Harcourt, he, sitting in
front alongside the driver, seemed scarcely to notice them at all.
For example: Two automobiles, one loaded with French Zouaves and the
other with Prussian infantrymen, all heavily armed and completely
accoutred, whizzed by them, going in the opposite direction. A most
winsome, heavily bejewelled gypsy lass flirted openly with an
affectionate butler beneath the windows of a bungalow, while a waspish
housemaid, evidently wrought to a high pitch by emotions of jealousy,
balefully spied upon them from the shelter of an adjacent shrubbery
clump. Out of a small fruit store emerged a benevolent, white-haired
Church of England clergyman, of the last century but one, in cassock,
flat hat and knee breeches. With him walked a most villainous-appearing
pirate, a wretch whose whiskered face was gashed with cutlass scars and
whose wicked legs were leathered hip-deep in jack boots. These two were
eating tangerines from the same paper bag as they issued forth together.
The car bearing our friends passed a mansion, the handsomest upon the
street. Out from its high-columned portals into the hot sunshine
staggered a young man whose lips were very red and whose moustache was
very black, with great hollows beneath his eyes and white patches at his
temples--a young man dressed in correct evening attire, who, pausing for
a moment, struck his open hand to his forehead with a gesture indicative
of intense despair--you somehow opined he had lost all at the gaming
table--then reeled from sight down a winding driveway. One glimpsed that
his glistening linen shirt bosom was of a pronounced saffron cast, with
collar and tie and cuffs all of the same bilious tone to match.
"Noticed the yellow, didn't you?" asked Mr. Harcourt. "That means he's
been doing indoor stuff. Under the lights yellow comes out white."
At the end of a long mile the jitney halted at a gateway set in a high
wooden wall beyond which might be seen the peaks of a glass-topped roof.
About this gateway clustered a large assemblage of citizens of all ages
and conditions, but with the young of both sexes predominating. As the
young women uniformly wore middy blouses and the young men sport shirts,
opened at the neck, there were bared throats and wide sailor collars
wherever one looked.
"Extra people," elucidated their host. "They get three a day--when they
work. We'll probably use a lot of them to-day."
Within the inclosure a new world unfolded itself for the travellers from
the Atlantic seaboard--in fact, sections of several new worlds. At the
heels of Mr. Harcourt they threaded their way along a great wooden stage
that was open, front and top, to the blue skies, and as they followed
after him they looked sideways into the interior of a wrecked and
deserted Belgian farmhouse; and next door to that into a courtroom now
empty of everything except its furnishings; and next door to that into
a gloomy dungeon with barred windows and painted canvas walls. They
took a turn across a dusty stretch of earth beyond the far end of the
segmented stage, and, lo, they stood in the gibbering midriff of an
Oriental city. Behind all was lath, furring and plaster, chicken wire,
two-by-fours and shingle nails; but in front 'twas a cross-section of
teeming bazaar life. How far away seemed 373 Japonica Avenue, Brooklyn,
then!
An energetic man in laced boots and a flannel shirt--Mr. Harcourt called
him the director--peered angrily into the perspective of the scene and,
waving a pasteboard megaphone in command, ordained that a distant
mountain should come ten feet nearer to him. Alongside of this young man
Mohammed was an amateur. For the mountain did obey, advancing ten feet,
no more and no less. Half a score of young men in cowboy garb enshrouded
themselves in flowing white draperies, took long, tasselled spears in
their hands, and swung themselves upon the backs of horses--and, behold,
a tribe of Bedouins trotted through the crowded, winding way, scattering
mendicants, priests, camel drivers and peddlers from before their path.
Upon the edge of all this Chester K. Pilkins hovered as one entranced.
He had lost Mrs. Pilkins; he was separated from Mr. Harcourt.
He became aware of three damsels of tender years who sat in a row upon
a pile of rough lumber near at hand. They wore flowing robes of many
colours; they were barefooted, their small toes showing pleasantly pink
and white below the hems of their robes, and their arms were drawn
primly behind them. He watched them. Although manifestly having no part
in the scene then being rehearsed for filming, they continued to hold
their arms in this restrained and presumably uncomfortable attitude,
as though they might be practising some new form of a deep-breathing
exercise.
As he watched, one of the three, catching his eye, arose and came
padding her little bare feet through the dust to where he stood.
"Do me a favour?" she inquired archly.
"Why--why, yes, certainly, if possible," answered Mr. Pilkins.
"Sure, it's possible. See this?" She shook her head, and a wayward
ringlet which dangled down against one cheek was agitated to and fro
across her pert face. "Well, it's tickling my nose something fierce.
Tuck it back up out of sight, will you?"
"I'm--I'm afraid I don't understand," stammered Mr. Pilkins, jostled
internally.
She turned slowly round, and he saw then that her wrists were crossed
behind her back and firmly bound together with a length of new cotton
rope.
"I'm one of the captive Armenians," she explained, facing him again.
"More'n a hour ago Wagstaff--he's the assistant director--he tied us up.
We gotta stay all tied up, just so, till our scene goes on. He's such a
bug on all them little details--Wagstaff is! Go on--be a good fella and
get this hair up out of my face, won't you? I'll be sneezing my head
off in another minute. But say--mind the make-up."
A brightish pink in colour, Mr. Pilkins extended a helping hand,
tingling inside of himself.
"Chester!"
It was his master's voice, speaking with most decided masterfulness. As
though the errant curl had been red-hot Mr. Pilkins jerked his
outstretched fingers back. The Armenian maiden retired precipitately,
her shoulders twitching.
"Chester, come here!"
Chester came, endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to avoid all outward
semblance of guilt.
"Chester, might I ask what you were doing with that--that young person?"
Mrs. Pilkins' manner was ominous.
"I was helping her--a little--with her hair."
"With her--why, what--do you----"
"She is tied. Her hands, you know. ... She----"
"Tied, is she?" Mrs. Pilkins bestowed a chilled stare upon the
retreating figure of the captive. "Well, she deserves to be. They should
keep her tied. Chester, I want you to stay close to me and not go
wandering off again."
"Yes, my dear, I will--I mean, I won't."
"Besides, you may be needed any minute now. Mr. Harcourt"--she indicated
that gentleman, who had approached--"has been kind enough to invite us
to take part in this beautiful production."
"But, my dear--but----"
"Chester, I wish for my sake you would refrain from keeping on saying
'but.' And please quit interrupting."
"You see--it's like this," explained Mr. Harcourt: "It's the scene at
the dock when the heroine gets home. You two are to be two of the
passengers--the director says he'll be very glad to have you take part.
I just spoke to him. There will be many others in the scene--extras, you
know. Think you'd like it? It will be an experience."
"As you say, Mr. Harcourt, it will be an experience," said Mrs. Pilkins.
"I accept with pleasure. So does my husband."
Promptly ensued then action, and plenty of it. With many others,
recruited from the ranks of the populace, the Chester Pilkinses were
herded into a corner of the open-faced stage at the back side of the
bazaar--a corner which the two presiding genii of that domain, known
technically and respectively as the boss carpenter and the head property
man, had, by virtue of their magic and in accordance with an order from
their overlord, the director, transformed, even as one waited, from
something else into the pierhead of a New York dock. With these same
others our two friends mounted a steep flight of steps behind the
scenes, and then, shoving sheeplike through a painted gangway, in a
painted bulkhead of a painted ship, they flocked down across a
canvas-sided gangplank to the ostensible deck of the presumable pier,
defiling off from left to right out of lens range, the while they smiled
and waved fond greetings to supposititious friends.
When they had been made to do this twice and thrice, when divers
stumbling individuals among them had been corrected of a desire to gaze,
with the rapt, fascinated stare of sleep-walkers, straight into the eye
of the machine, when the director was satisfied with his rehearsal, he
suddenly yelled "Camera!" and started them at it all over again.
In this instant a spell laid hold on Chester Pilkins. As one exalted he
went through the picture, doing his share and more than his share to
make it what a picture should be. For being suddenly possessed with the
instinct to act--an instinct which belongs to all of us, but which some
of us after we have grown up manage to repress--Chester acted. In his
movements there was the unstudied carelessness which is best done when
it is studied; in his fashion of carrying his furled umbrella and his
strapped steamer rug--the Ziegler Company had furnished the steamer rug
but the umbrella was his own--there was natural grace; in his quick
start of recognition on beholding some dear one in the imaginary throng
waiting down on the pier out of sight there was that art which is the
highest of all arts.
With your permission we shall skip the orange groves, languishing
through that day for Mr. and Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins to come and see
them. We shall skip the San Francisco Exposition. We shall skip the
Yosemite Valley, in which to Chester there seemed to be something
lacking, and the Big Trees, which after all were much like other trees,
excepting these were larger. These things the travellers saw within the
scope of three weeks, and the end of those three weeks and the half of a
fourth week brings them and us back to 373 Japonica Avenue. There daily
Chester watched the amusement columns of the _Eagle_.
On a Monday evening at seven-fifteen he arrived home from the office,
holding in his hand a folded copy of that dependable sheet.
"Chester," austerely said Mrs. Pilkins as he let himself in at the door,
"you are late, and you have kept everything waiting. Hurry through your
dinner. We are going over to the Lewinsohns for four-handed rummy and
then a rarebit."
"Not to-night, Gertrude Maud," said Chester.
"And why not to-night?" demanded the lady with a rising inflection.
"Because," said Chester, "to-night we are going to the Bijou Palace
Theatre. The Prince of the Desert goes on to-night for the first run."
"Oh," said Mrs. Pilkins understandingly. "I'll telephone Mrs. Lewinsohn
we can't come--make some excuse or other. Yes, we'll go to the Bijou
Palace." She said this as though the idea had been hers all along.
Seated in the darkened auditorium they watched the play unfold upon the
screen. They watched while the hero, a noble son of the Arabic sands,
rescued the heroine, who was daughter to a comedy missionary, from the
clutches of the wicked governor-general. They saw the barefoot Armenian
maids dragged by mocking nomads across burning wastes to the tented den
of a villainous sheik, and in the pinioned procession Chester recognised
the damsel of the truant curl and the ticklish nose. They saw the
intrepid and imperturbable American correspondent as, unafraid, he stood
in the midst of carnage and slaughter, making notes in a large
leather-backed notebook such as all newspaper correspondents are known
to carry. But on these stirring episodes Chester K. Pilkins looked with
but half an eye and less than half his mind. He was waiting for
something else.
Eventually, at the end of Reel Four, his waiting was rewarded, and he
achieved the ambition which all men bear within themselves, but which
only a few, comparatively speaking, ever gratify--the yearning to see
ourselves as others see us. While the blood drummed in his heated
temples Chester Pilkins saw himself, and he liked himself. I do not
overstretch the truth when I say that he liked himself first-rate. And
when, in the very midst of liking himself, he reflected that elsewhere
over the land, in scores, perhaps in hundreds of places such as this
one, favoured thousands were seeing him too--well, the thought was
well-nigh overpowering.
* * * * *
For the succeeding three nights Mr. Pilkins' fireside knew him not. The
figure of speech here employed is purely poetic, because, as a matter of
fact, the house was heated by steam. But upon each of these three
evenings he sat in the Bijou Palace, waiting for that big moment to come
when he before his own eyes should appear. Each night he discovered new
and pleasing details about himself--the set of his head upon his
shoulders, the swing of his arm, the lift of his leg; each night, the
performance being ended, he came forth regarding his fellow patrons
compassionately, for they were but the poor creatures who had made up
the audience, while he veritably had been not only part of the audience
but part of the entertainment as well; each night he expected to be
recognised in the flesh by some emerging person of a keen discernment of
vision, but was disappointed here; and each night he went home at
ten-forty-five and told Gertrude Maud that business on the other side of
the bridge had detained him. She believed him. She--poor, blinded
wretch--did not see in his eyes the flickering reflection of the spark
of desire, now fanning into a flame of resolution within the brazier of
his ribs.
Thursday night came, and The Prince of the Desert film concluded its
engagement at the Bijou Palace. Friday night came, but Chester K.
Pilkins did not. He did not come home that night nor the next day nor
the next night. Without warning to any one he had vanished utterly,
leaving behind no word of whatsoever nature. He was gone, entirely and
completely gone, taking with him only the garments in which he stood--a
black cutaway, black four-in-hand tie, black derby hat, plain button
shoes, plain, white, stiff-bosomed shirt. I am quoting now from the
description embodied in a printed general alarm sent out by the police
department, which general alarm went so far as to mention considerable
bridge-work in the upper jaw and a pair of fairly prominent ears.
At last Chester K. Pilkins, although not present to read what was
printed of him, got into the papers. Being questioned by reporters, his
late employers declared that the missing man was of unimpeachable habits
and that his accounts were straight, and immediately then, in a panic,
set experts at work on his books. Remarkable to state, his accounts were
straight. In the bank, in his wife's name, he had left a comfortable
balance of savings. His small investments were in order. They likewise
were found to be in his wife's name; it seemed he had sent a written
order for their transfer on the eve of his flight--if flight it was. The
house already was hers by virtue of a deed executed years before.
Discussing the nine-day sensation, the ladies of the neighbourhood said
that even if Chester Pilkins had run away with some brazen hussy or
other, as to them seemed most probable--because, you know, you never can
tell about these little quiet men--at least he had left poor, dear
Gertrude well provided for, and that, of course, was something.
Something this may have been; but the deserted wife mourned and was
desolate. She wanted Chester back; she was used to having him round. He
had been a good husband, as husbands go--not exciting, perhaps, but
good. Despite strong evidences to the contrary, she could not bring
herself to believe that deliberately he had abandoned her. He was dead,
by some tragic and violent means, or else he had been kidnapped. Twice
with a sinking heart she accompanied a detective sergeant from borough
headquarters to the morgue, there to gaze upon a poor relic of mortality
which had been fished out of the river, but which bore no resemblance to
her Chester nor, indeed, to anything else that once had been human.
After this the police lost even a perfunctory interest in the quest. But
the lady was not done. She paid a retainer to a private detective agency
having branches over the country, and search was maintained in many
places, high and low.
Three months went by; then a fourth. Japonica Avenue may have forgotten
Chester Pilkins, but Gertrude Maud had not. At the tag end of the fourth
month came tidings from the main office of the detective agency which,
overnight, started Mrs. Pilkins to where--as the passenger agents for
the transcontinental lines so aptly phrased it--California's Golden
Strand is kissed by the pellucid waves of the Sun-Down Sea. It couldn't
be true, this report which had been brought to her by a representative
of the great sleuth for whom the agency was named; indeed, it was
inconceivable to one who knew her husband that such a report could be
true, but she would make certain for herself. She would--so this
suffering, conscientious woman told herself--leave no stone unturned.
She would neglect to follow up no clue merely because of its manifest
improbability.
So back she journeyed to that selfsame town where the Ziegler studios
were housed. A local representative of the agency, being advised by
telegraph in advance of her coming, met her at the station. Expressing
physically the gentle sympathy of an honorary pallbearer, he led her to
an automobile, and with her he drove for miles through streets which she
remembered having traversed at least once before, until in the far
suburban reaches of the city, where the blue foothills of the coast
range came down toward the sea, he brought her to a centre of the
moving-picture industry; not the Ziegler establishment this time, but to
the curious place known as Filmville--ninety fenced-in acres of seeming
madness. It was getting on toward five o'clock in the afternoon when the
automobile halted before its minareted portals. Leaving Mrs. Pilkins in
the car her companion went to confer briefly with a uniformed individual
on duty at the door. Returning to her he spoke as follows:
"The--ahem--the party we've got under suspicion is out on location with
a company. But they're due back here before dark. I guess we'd better
wait a spell."
He helped her to alight, dismissed the automobile, and accompanied her
to an ornamental seat facing an exceedingly ornamental fountain which
spouted in a grass plot hard by the gates to Filmville. As she sat and
waited, strangely clad men and women--purporting to represent in their
attire many periods of the world's history and many remote corners of
the world's surface--passed by, going in and out. From over the high
walls came to her jungle sounds and jungle smells, for this large
concern maintained its own zoo upon its own premises. Persistently a
sacred cow of India, tethered in a recess of the fence where herbage
sprouted, mooed for an absent mate. The voice of the creature matched
Mrs. Pilkins' thoughts. Internally she was mooing for her mate too.
Twilight impended when two automobile loads of principals, attired
cowboyishly and cowgirlishly, came thumping out of the north along the
dusty road. These persons dismounted and trooped inside. A little behind
them, heralded by a jingle of accoutrement, came a dozen or so punchers
riding ponies. With jest and quip bandied back and forth, and to the
tinkling of their spurs, these last dropped off their jaded mounts,
leaving the ponies to stand with drooping heads and dragging bridles,
and went clumping on their high heels into a small wooden place,
advertising liquid refreshment, which stood across the way. The
detective softly joggled Mrs. Pilkins' elbow.
"Come on, ma'am," he said; "just follow me. And don't say anything until
you're sure. And don't scream or faint or anything like that--if you can
help it."
"I shan't," said Mrs. Pilkins, all a-tremble. She was resolved not to
scream and she was not the fainting kind.
Very naturally and very properly, as a gently nurtured woman, Mrs.
Pilkins had never seen the interior of a barroom. From just inside the
swinging doors where her escort halted her she looked about the place
with the eye of curiosity, and even though her mind swirled tumultuously
she comprehended it--the glassware, the pictures on the walls, the short
bar, the affable dispenser who stood behind it, and the row of cowboys
who lined the front of it from end to end, with their backs and hunched
shoulders all turned to her, stretching away in a diminishing
perspective.
"Wait a minute, lady," advised the detective in a whisper. "Take your
time and look 'em over careful. And be sure--be sure to be sure."
The lady strove to obey. She looked and she looked. At the back of the
room three punchers were clumped together, withdrawn slightly from their
fellows--a tall puncher, a medium-sized puncher, and between these two
a small puncher.
"Here, ol'-timer," bade the tall puncher, drumming with his knuckles
upon the bar, "wait on fellers that a-got a real thirst. Three long
beers!"
The beers were drawn and placed at properly spaced intervals before the
three. Their three right elbows rose at an angle; three flagons of
creamy brew vanished.
A fourth cowboy slid down toward them.
"Well," he demanded boisterously, "how's Little Chestnut makin' out?
Still saddle sore? Still hatin' to think of the place where you got to
meet that there old paint pony of yourn to-mor' mornin'?"
It was the tall cowboy who made answer.
"Nix on that Chestnut thing," he said. "That's old stuff. You should
a-seen the little man stay by that pinto of hisn when she got uptious a
while ago--jist stay by her and pour the leather into her. No, sir, that
there Chestnut stuff don't go any more for this bunch. This here"--and
his long flannel-clad arm was endearingly enwrapped about the shoulders
of his small companion--"this here boy from now on is Old Chesty."
Even though viewed from behind, it might be seen that the person thus
rechristened was protruding a proud chest. With a little swagger he
breasted the bar.
"I'm buying," he stated loudly. "Everybody's in on this one."
"Whee!" yelled the big cowboy. "Chesty's buyin'--this one's on Old
Chesty."
But another voice rose above his voice, over-topping it--the cry of an
agonised woman:
"Oh, Chester!"
As though he had been bee-stung the little man pivoted on his heels. His
chaps hung floppingly about his short legs; his blue shirt was open
halfway down his sunburnt chest; his pistol holster flapped against his
flank; his wide white hat was upon the back of his head; his neck was
tanned brown; his face was red and sweaty; his large outstanding ears
were burnt a bright, translucent crimson; his hands were dirty--but it
was Chester. For one moment, contemplating the accusing, brimming eyes
of the lady, he flinched and shrank as one reared amid the refining
influences of Japonica Avenue under such circumstances as these might
well have flinched, might well have shrunk. Then he stiffened and in all
visible regards was again Old Chesty, the roughrider.
"Hello, Gertrude," he said, just like that.
"Oh, Chester!" she wailed the words in louder key even than before.
Like the gentleman that he was, the barkeeper turned squarely round and
began polishing the valve of a beer pump with the palm of his moist
hand. With a glance which swiftly travelled from one to another the tall
cowboy gathered up his fellows and speedily they withdrew through the
swinging doors, passing the lady with faces averted, profoundly actuated
all by considerations inspired of their delicate outdoor sensibilities.
Except for the detective person, husband and wife, to all intents and
purposes, stood alone, face to face.
"Oh, Chester," she repeated for the third time, and now forgivingly her
arms were outstretched. "Oh, Chester, how could you do it?"
"Do what, Gertrude?"
"Run away and l-l-leave me. What did you do it for?"
"Three dollars a day," he answered simply. There was no flippancy in the
reply, but merely directness.
"Oh, Chester, to give up your home--your position--me--for that! Oh,
what madness possessed you! Chester, come back home."
"Back home to Brooklyn? Not on your life." His tone was firmness
itself. He spoke commandingly, as one who not only is master of himself
but of a present situation. "Gertrude, you'd better stay here, too, now
that you've come. I guess maybe I could get 'em to work you in on the
regular list of extras. You'd probably film well." He eyed her
appraisingly.
"But, oh, Chester, to go--as you went--with never a word--never a line
to me!"
"Gertrude, you wouldn't have understood. Don't you see, honey, it's like
this." He took her in his arms, even as she had meant to take him into
hers, and, with small, comforting pats upon her heaving back, sought to
soothe her. "It's like this--I'm before the public now. Why, Gerty, I'm
in the eyes of the world."