Part 14

“Save me! It’s coming after me. I hear it. Don’t let it get me, Judge!”

When at length his Honor was released, the sike greeted him with surprise.

“It’s you, is it?”

“It’s me,” agreed the magistrate. “Or if not me, I.” He was the bearded victim of “Cherchez la Chicken.”

“We found him,” remarked the sike, indicating Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts.

“So I perceive. It’s a small world.”

“Small like a Harlem flat,” confirmed Miss Nora McSears discontentedly. “You can’t turn around in it without rousing the family. _That_,” she pursued, pointing out to Corporal Slayter one of the policemen engaged in preventing Mr. Foxley from crawling into the commitment file, “is Pa.”

“Howdy, Pa!” said the flit.

“Whaddye mean, ‘Pa’?” demanded the thunderstruck officer.

“In-law,” explained Mr. Slayter. “To-be,” he added.

“Perhaps,” amended Miss McSears.

“Sure thing,” asseverated the flit blithely. “It’s in the air. You can’t dodge it.”

“Other things difficult to dodge are in the air,” observed the magistrate. “Reuben, as friend to friend and unofficially, how did you get these?”

“By the hour,” replied Mr. Watts. “I hired ’em.”

“Are you responsible for their actions?”

“Upon and after the hour of 11:05 P.M., I am.”

“You escape,” pronounced the magistrate. “At 11:02 P.M. I am informed, an armored tank filled with desperadoes, I. W. W. Bolshevists, anarchists, nihilists, prohibitionists and other enemies of the public welfare, invaded West Forty-fourth Street and did there and then interrupt an orderly meeting of the Society for the Abolition of Tobacco, Bridge, Dancing and other Hellish Habits, by felonious means, to wit: firing upon it with machine guns, gatlings, howitzers, hand-grenades, rifles, revolvers and sundry lethal weapons, against the ordinances duly made and provided for the maintenance of the peace.”

“So help me God,” intoned a large, solemn, pulpy person, rising in his seat.

“That’s the guy,” cried the flit, “that called us ‘Bol-she-_vee_-ki!’ Lemme attim.”

“Then you admit that you are them,” said the magistrate. “Or, if not them, they.”

“We do,” said the gob; “with mitigating circumstances.”

“There is a warrant out against you.”

A blond and frescoed portent projected itself upward from a side bench. “Make it two, Judge. And make the second one for murder.”

“Saints preserve us!” groaned the sike. “The sorrowing protectress of the silhouetted pup!”

“It is a small world,” repeated the magistrate. “This gentleman (indicating the stricken Mr. Foxley) who originally came here for the purpose of taking the pledge, now prefers the charge that you instigated to attack him without provocation a prehistoric monster of the dragon or fire-spouting persuasion which, after destroying his automobile, chased him through a plate-glass window and totally wrecked his nerves. Comparing his description of the monster with my own impression of your vehicle, and remembering that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, I conclude that it is her. Or, if not her, it. What have you to say?”

“Just this,” answered Mr. Watts with annoyance, “I came here to be married, not prosecuted. Come now, Hartley, as friend to friend, can’t you fix this? It may be my last chance.”

“Your friend with the talent for blackmail seems to be a person of infinite resource,” said the magistrate, glancing toward the sike. “Has he any suggestions?”

“If I may be permitted,” said the sike, modestly rising, “I suggest, first, that Mr. Foxley is too good a sport to spoil a wedding, if assured that the groom will never again travel Fifth Avenue in a tank. (Mr. Foxley grunted.) As for the noble cause of Suppression of Tobacco _et cetera_, I propose a generous epithalamic contribution thereto by the happy bridegroom. We now come to the ill-fated canine, and its sorrowing owner. Though myself in a state of genteel poverty, I will gladly start a subscription to bury it, or if that prove impracticable, to have it pasted in a scrap-book, with appropriate honors.”

“Nothin’ doin’!” asserted the bereaved blonde in angry tones. “I wanta tell you--”

“One moment, please. Would it not soothe your injured feelings to be invited to the wedding and to sign as legal witness? There is a reporter present, and I assume that the nuptials of Mr. Reuben Renssalaer Watts with Miss Carey Vail will receive a meed of desirable publicity extending to all who participate.”

“Not _the_ Miss Carey Vail!” exclaimed the awe-struck blonde, who went into Society eagerly, though vicariously, through the medium of the daily press.

“The same,” declared Mr. Watts. “Positively last appearance in that rôle. That is,” he added anxiously, “if you accept our earnest invitation to come to the wedding.”

“Chawmed, I’m suah,” murmured the lady, and proceeded to powder her nose from an apparatus concealed in a dangling bag.

The sike felt a soft touch on his elbow. Lieutenant Dolly Barrett’s large gray eyes glowed warmly up into his.

“You ought to be running the Peace Conference,” she opined.

“And to think,” mourned the sike, “that next month I’ll be acting the melancholy mentor to a flock of corn-fed prairie-rubes.”

“Court will convene in my private room for matrimonial purposes at once,” proclaimed the magistrate.

The ceremony was brief and business-like. The witnesses were the sike and Mrs. Barrett, quite close together, the flit and Miss McSears (bracketed by the former), the gob, with rating and ship attached, Mr. Foxley in a shaken hand, and Mrs. Eudora Fotheringay in letters half an inch high and ninety degrees slant. The whole party attended by the court officials went out to see the pair off. The flit, saluting, stepped forward.

“Cab, sir?”

“Certainly,” assented the bridegroom.

“Certainly not,” amended the bride.

“Not?” queried the flit, crestfallen.

“Taxi,” said the new Mrs. Watts decisively, hailing one as it rounded the corner.

“Cab, lady?” coyly invited the flit, turning to Miss McSears, as the bridal couple were whirled away.

“Subway,” retorted Pa McSears emphatically, “speaking for self and daughter.”

“Cab, sir?” the operator solicited Mr. Bingle Foxley.

“Help!” responded that gentleman, making a leap for the nearest haven, which chanced to be Mrs. Fotheringay’s limousine, where he was hospitably received.

“Cab, Chaw?” cried the desperate flit, seeing his custom dropping away.

“Life is sweet,” observed the gob, and followed Mr. Foxley into his perfumed retirement.

“Cab, buddy?” almost wept Corporal Slayter, addressing himself in a seductive coo to Professor Follansbee James. “_And_ sister,” he added, noting the confidential juxtaposition of the two heads.

“We are walking, thank you so much,” said Lieutenant Barrett sweetly.

“Old Bird,” the sorrowing flit addressed the metallic accomplice of his crimes, “we are, as it were, dumped into Cupid’s ash-can. Cheer up! I will never desert you.” His eyes fell upon the legend, “To be returned.” “I’d forgotten about that,” he murmured, “Where to, I wonder?” He reversed the placard and was confronted by this warning in red and minatory letters:

Do Not Operate

Condemned as

DANGEROUS

The flit cast a pensive eye up the street where the dust of the bridal departure still hung, shifted it to the wake of the Fotheringay limousine bearing the gob and the reformed Foxley from the stricken field, glanced yearningly toward the corner where Miss Nora McSears, temporarily a parental captive, threw him a swift and comforting signal, and regarded with benignity two uniformed figures marching along the sidewalk side-by-side, in that sweet accord which apostles of the millennium prescribe not alone for the lion and the lamb, but also for the officer and the soldier in the ranks.

“Dangerous,” he repeated, as a grin, appreciative but tender, lighted up his rugged features. Then, with conviction, “_I’ll_ say it is!”

_McClure’s Magazine_

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH

BY

EDNA FERBER

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH[7]

By EDNA FERBER

When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the personalities, helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in newspaper parlance as national figures. One n. f. is enough for any short story. Three would swamp a book. It’s like one of those plays advertised as having an allstar cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and been greeted, and done his twinkling, the play has faded into the background. You can’t see the heavens for the stars.

Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honor at a dinner, needs no introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though quoted, thus:

“Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humorist, the ears of a comic ol’ clo’es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to a vice.”

Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, “It’s scarlet! No--it’s blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--”

That was Sid Hahn.

I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black cigar, unlighted, in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include?) knew all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those middle-western towns with a highfalutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the profession which he was to dominate in America. There’s no record of his having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don’t know that Sid Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever said to himself in so many words:

“I’m going to be what he is. I’m going to concentrate on it. I won’t let anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I’m going to be. But I know.... And you’ve got to be selfish. You’ve got to be selfish.”

Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination running through the whole fibre of his being could have been crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.

By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first magnitude twinklers. Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.

He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions. Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by people who did not know that he was responsible for them, than a popular East Side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play with real ones, like God. But always kind.

No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him; the red-haired ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol, while the fair ones burnt incense and made offering of shewbread. Figuratively he kicked over the basket of shewbread and of the incense said, “Take away that stuff! It smells!”

Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.

* * * * *

It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the famous Renée Paterne, of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he regarded her with what is known as a long level look. She knew at that time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as a sort of secretary, “Wallie, can’t you do something to make her stop rolling her eyes around at me like that? It’s awful! She makes me think of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my inkwell.”

Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. “What’s that she said?”

“She says,” translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, “that monsieur is a woman-hater.”

“My God! I thought she didn’t understand English!”

“She doesn’t. But she’s a woman. Not only that, she’s a Frenchwoman. They don’t need to know a language to understand it.”

“Where did you get that, h’m? That wasn’t included in your Berlitz course, was it?”

Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen face. “No, I learned that in another school.”

Wallie Ascher’s early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn’s beginning. And what Augustin Daly had been to Sid Hahn’s imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to Wallie’s. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator’s foil for a mother can be said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.

He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the up-stairs suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers, the kind of office boy who is addicted to shrill clear whistling unless very firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go, while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it.

“Now look here,” Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer office typewriter--“look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain’t a--a--”

“Aviary,” suggested Wallie, almost shyly.

Miss Feldman glared. “How did you know that word!”

“I don’t know,” helplessly. “But it’s the word, isn’t it?”

Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. “You’re too smart for your age, you are.”

“I know it,” Wallie had agreed, humbly.

There’s no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn’t know one note from another, and doesn’t to this day.

At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance to twenty’s accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room (rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki. Saki was the perfect servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when, in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he would say, “That will do, Saki.” Then, all evening, he would play softly to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the side of the piano (grand).

His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn called him vaguely, “Heh, boy!” but he grew to know him later as Wallie. From errand boy, office boy, call boy, he had become, by that time, a sort of unofficial assistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but Wallie and the director was aware of this. The director never did admit it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.

He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He buttoned his coat over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold drizzle of the November evening.

Hahn’s apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie’s errand.

It was Saki--or Saki’s equivalent--who opened the door. A white-jacketed, soft-stepping Jap, world old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond. Some one was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.

“You’re to give this to Mr. Hahn. He’s waiting for it.”

“Genelmun come in,” said the Jap, softly.

“No, he doesn’t want to see me. Just give it to him, see?”

“Genelmun come in.” Evidently orders.

“Oh, all right. But I know he doesn’t want--”

Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, and then hardened. He didn’t know it then but it was his great resolve.

Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the kindest eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own inability to reproduce it.

The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie.

“God, I wish I could play!”

“Helps a lot.”

“You play?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Oh, most anything I have heard once. And some things I kind of make up.”

“Compose, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Play one of those.”

So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know “Good Night--Pleasant Dreams.” He hadn’t named it then. It wasn’t even published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for Sid Hahn. Since “After the Ball,” no popular song has achieved the success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was sentimental, but so, too, are the “Suwanee River” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” and they’ll be singing those when more classical songs have long been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam and glow in the lamplight.

When he had finished playing Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, “What’re you going to do with it?”

“With what?”

“With what you’ve got. You know.”

Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played. “I’m going to--I’m going to do a lot with it.”

“Yeh, but how?”

Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys. For a long minute he did not answer. Then: “By thinking about it all the time. And working like hell.... And you’ve got to be selfish.... You’ve got to be selfish....”

As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the doorway. So Hahn said, “Stay and have dinner with me,” instead of what he had meant to say.

“Oh, I can’t! Thanks. I--” He wanted to, terribly, but the thought was too much.

“Better.”

They had dinner together. Even under the influence of Hahn’s encouragement, and two glasses of mellow wine whose name he did not know, Wallie did not become fatuous. They talked about music--neither of them knew anything about it, really. Wallie confessed that he used it as an intoxicant and a stimulant.

“That’s it!” cried Hahn, excitedly. “If I could play I’d have done more.”

“Why don’t you get one of those piano-players? Whatyoucallems--” then, immediately, “No, of course not.”

“Nah, that doesn’t do it,” said Hahn, quickly. “That’s like adopting a baby when you can’t have one of your own. It isn’t the same. It isn’t the same. It looks like a baby, and acts like a baby, and sounds like a baby--but it isn’t yours. It isn’t you. That’s it! It isn’t you!”

“Yeh,” agreed Wallie, nodding. So perfectly did they understand each other, this ill-assorted pair.

It was midnight before Wallie left. They had both forgotten about the play manuscript whose delivery had been considered so important. The big room was gracious, quiet, soothing. A fire flickered in the grate. One lamp glowed softly--almost sombrely.

As Wallie rose at last to go he shook himself slightly like one coming out of a trance. He looked about the golden room. “Gee!”