Local Color Part 17

"Oh, we'll find somebody," said Offutt optimistically. The young of the playwrighting species are const.i.tutionally optimistic.

"Oh, we will, will we? Well, for example, who?--since you're so confident about it."

"That's up to you," countered Offutt, "I should worry!"

"Take it from me, young man, you'd better worry," growled Verba morosely.

"But, Verba," contended Offutt, "there must be somebody loose who'll fit the part. What with thousands of actors looking for engagements----"

"Say, Offutt, what's the use of going over that again?" broke in Verba in a tone which indicated he was prepared to go over it again. "To begin with, there aren't thousands of actors looking for jobs. There are a few actors looking for jobs--and a few thousand others looking for jobs who only think they can act. Offhand, I can list you just three men fit to play this grandfather part--or four, if you stick in Grainger as an added starter."

He held up a long, slender hand, ticking off the names on his fingers.

"There's Warburton, and there's Pell, and there's old Gabe Clayton.

Warburton's tied up in the pictures. d.a.m.n the movies! They're stealing everybody worth a hang. I got a swell offer myself yesterday from the Ziegler crowd to direct features for 'em. The letter's on my desk now.

Old Gabe is in a sanitarium taking the rest cure--which means for the time being he's practically sober, but not available for us or anybody else. And Guy Pell's under contract to Fructer Brothers, and you know what a swell chance there is of their loaning him to our shop.

"That doesn't leave anybody but Grainger, who's so swelled up with conceit that he's impossible. And, anyhow, he's too young. Just as I told you yesterday, I only figured him in as a last chance. I don't want a young fellow playing this part--with his face all messed up with false whiskers and an artificial squeak in his voice. I want an old man--one that looks old and talks old and can play old.

"He's got to be right or nothing's right. You may have written this piece, boy; but, by gum, I'm responsible for the way it's cast, and I want a regular, honest-to-G.o.d grandfather. Only," he added, quoting the tag of a current Broadway story, "only there ain't no such animal."

"I still insist, Verba," put in Offutt, "that you overestimate the importance of the grandfather--he's only a character bit."

"Son," said Verba, "you talk like an author! Maybe you thought he was a bit when you wrote him in; but he's not. He's going to carry this play.

He's the axle that the whole action turns on and if he's wrong the whole thing's wrong. If he falls down your play falls down."

"Well, suppose he is," said Offutt plaintively. The bruised worm was beginning to turn. "Am I to blame because I write a part so human and so lifelike that n.o.body's competent to do it?"

Verba gave him a sidelong glance and grinned sardonically. "Don't ask me whose fault it is," he said. "I know this: In the old days actors were actors." Verba, who was perhaps forty-four, spoke with the air of having known Edmund Kean intimately. "They bred real artists then--people who had versatility and a range. You got hold of a play and you went out and hired a bunch of troupers, and they played it for you. Now we don't have actors any more--we only have types.

"Everybody's a type. A man or a woman starts out being one kind of type, and sticks right there. Dramatists write parts for types, and managers go out and hire types for the parts. Sometimes they can't find the right type and then there's another expensive production taking a trip to its eternal rest in the storehouse. I don't know whose fault it is--I only know it's not mine. It's h.e.l.l--that's what it is--simply h.e.l.l!"

Gloom choked Verba. He stared moodily ahead of him, where the broad of a wide, blue-ginghamed back showed above the draped tops of the next row of seats but one. Suddenly he smote his hands together.

"Bateman!" he exclaimed. "Old Bird Bateman!"

Up from behind the next row of seats but one rose a ch.o.r.elady with her nose in the air and her clenched fists on the places where her hips should have been--if she had any hips.

"I beg your par-r-don?" she inquired, quivering with a grand, indignant politeness; "was you referrin' to me as an ould boid?"

"Madam," said Verba, "resume your pleasures. I wasn't thinking of you."

"Thin why was you lookin' at me whin you said it? You may be the owner of this b.u.m dump, f'r all I care, but job or no job, let me tell you this, young man--there's no black Prowtestant Jew alive kin call me out of me own name an'----"

"Oh, shut up," said Verba, without heat. He got on his feet. "Come on, Offutt, the lady thinks I'm trying to flirt with her and between the three of us, we're breaking up rehearsals. Let's get out--I've got an idea." In the half light his eyes shone like a cat's.

Outside, on the hot pavement, he took Offutt by the lapels of his coat.

"Boy," he said, "did you ever hear of Burton Bateman--better known as Old Bird Bateman?"

Offutt shook his head.

"Never did," he confessed.

"You're too young at this game to remember, I guess," said Verba. "Well, then, did you ever hear of the Scudder Stock Company?"

"Of course I've heard of that," said Offutt. "It was long before my time though."

"It was long before everybody's time," a.s.sented Verba. "Ten years is the same as a century on this street. But twenty-five years ago Burt Bateman played leads with the Scudder Stock Company--yes; and played juveniles and walking gentlemen and friends of the family and long-lost heirs and Dutchmen and Irishmen and n.i.g.g.e.rs--played high-comedy parts and low-comedy parts--played anything there was to play.

"He wasn't one of your single-barrelled modern types and none of your old-time ranting scenery-biters either; he was an actor. If he'd come along a little later they'd have made a star out of him and probably ruined him. You'd have remembered him then. But he never was a star. He never was featured even. He just kept right on being an actor. And gee, how he could eat up an old man's part!"

"You speak of him as though he were dead," said Offutt.

"He might as well be--he's forgotten," said Verba, unconsciously coining all Broadway's epitaph for all Broadway's tribe. "I haven't seen him for fifteen years, but I understand he's still alive--that is, he hasn't quit breathing. Somebody was telling me not long ago they'd crossed his trail 'way downtown.

"You see, Burt Bateman was a character in his way, just as old Nate Scudder was one in his way. I guess that's why they hung together so long. When the theatrical district started to move uptown Nate wouldn't move with it. It moved from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-third, and from there to Thirty-fourth, and from there to Forty-second--and it's still headed north. But Scudder stayed where he was. And it broke him--broke his heart, too, I guess. Anyhow, he died and his organisation scattered--all but Bateman. He wouldn't scatter. The heirs fell out and the estate--what was left of it--got tied up in litigation; and it's been tied up ever since."

He turned and waved a long arm at a pa.s.sing taxi. The driver curved his machine up to the curb.

"Come on!" said Verba, making to cross the sidewalk.

"Come on where?" asked Offutt.

"We're going to University Place--you and me," said Verba, quickened and alive all over with his inspiration. "We're going down to Scudder's Theatre. Didn't know there was such a theatre as Scudder's, did you?

Well, there is--what's left of it. We're going down there to find Old Bird Bateman. That's where he was, last accounts. And if the booze hasn't got him he's going to play that d.a.m.n grandfather in this show of yours."

"Can he do it?"

Verba halted with one foot in the taxi.

"Can he do it? Watch him, boy--that's all! Just watch him. Say, it's a notion--digging that old boy out of the graveyard.

"You never heard of him and I'd forgotten him; but you take a lot of these old-timers who don't think there've been any actors since f.a.n.n.y Davenport and Billy Florence--they'll remember him. And you bet they'll come to see him. We'll give this town a sensation--and that's what it loves, this town--sensations."

Once upon a time--that was when he was a green reporter newly come to town--Offutt had known, more or less minutely, almost every prowlable inch of the tip of the long seamy tongue of rock that is called Manhattan Island. Now, as a story-writer and a play-writer, he only went down there when he sought for local colour in Greenwich Village, or around Was.h.i.+ngton Square or on the lower East Side. As for Verba, he found his local colour, ready-mixed, in scene-painters' pots and make-up boxes. Being a typical New Yorker--if there is such a thing--he was as insular, as provincial, as closely bound to his own briefened ranging ground as none but a typical New Yorker can be. To him this wasn't a metropolis of five boroughs, many bridges and five-and-a-half millions.

To him this was a strip of street, something less than two miles long, with shorter stretches of street meeting it at right angles, east and west, as ribs meet a spine. His map of New York would have resembled a codfish's skeleton, its head aiming toward far-away Harlem, the fork in its tail pointing to the distant Battery. To him therefore Twenty-third Street was Farthest South. What might lie below was in the Antarctic Circle of community life.

They crossed Twenty-third Street and invaded a district grown strange to his eyes--a district where tall loft buildings, the successors to the sweatshops of an earlier, but not very much earlier, day, mounted, floor by floor, above the humbler roofs of older houses. They crossed Fourteenth, the taxi weaving a way through dense ma.s.ses of men who gabbled in strange tongues among themselves, for lunch-time had come and the garment workers, the feather-workers and the fur-workers, deserting their work benches for an hour, had flocked into the open, packing the sidewalks and overflowing upon the asphalt, to chaffer and gossip and take the air. Just below Fourteenth Street they swung eastward and turned into University Place, which is a street of past memories and present acute activities, and, in a minute, obeying Verba's instructions, their driver brought them to a standstill before a certain number.

"Give it the once-over," advised Verba as he climbed out and felt in his pocket for the fare. "You can figure for yourself how far out of the world it is--n.o.body's had the nerve to try to open it up as a moving-picture palace. And that's the tip-off on any shack in this burg that'll hold a crowd, a screen and a projecting machine all at the same time."

Offutt looked, and marvelled that he had never noticed this place before since surely, covering a.s.signments or on exploration jaunts, he must have pa.s.sed it by a score of times. It stood midway of the block. On one side of it was a little p.a.w.nshop, its single grimy window filled with the strange objects which persons acquire, seemingly, for p.a.w.ning purposes exclusively--sword-canes and mandolins with mother-of-pearl insets in them, and moss-agate cuff b.u.t.tons. On the other side was a trunk store with half of its wares cluttering the narrow-door pa.s.sage and signs everywhere displayed to inform the public that the proprietor was going out of business and must sell his stock at an enormous sacrifice, wherefore until further notice, perfectly ruinous prices would prevail. It appears to be a characteristic of all trunk-stores that their proprietors are constantly going out of business and that their contents, invariably, are to be had below cost.

Between these two establishments gaped a recessed and cavernous entryway flanked by two big stone pillars of a dropsical contour and spanned over at the top by a top-heavy cornice ponderously and painfully Corinthian in aspect. The outjutting eaves rested flat on the coping stones and from there the roof gabled up sharply. Old gates, heavily chained and slanting inward, warded the opening between the pair of pillars, so that the mouth of the place was muzzled with iron, like an Elizabethan shrew's.

Above, the building was beetle-browed; below, it was dish-faced. A student of architectural criminology would pause before this facade and take notes.

The s.p.a.ce inclosed within the skewed and bent gate pickets was a snug harbour for the dust of many a gritty day. There were little grey drifts of it at the foot of each of the five steps that led up to the flagged floor level; secretions of grime covered the barred double doors on beyond the steps, until the original colour was only to be guessed at; sc.r.a.ps of dodgers, pieces of newspaper and tattered handbills adhered to every carved projection at the feet of the columns, like dead leaves about tree boles in the woods.