Believe You Me! Part 21

DO YOU NEED A JOB? HERE ARE THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY AND A VICTORY NOTE

GOES WITH EVERY ONE!"

Then come the list. I will put down a part of it so you can realize what a a.s.sortment of things has to be done to keep the seive in civilization.

4 handsome juveniles for motion-picture work--stage experience unnecessary.

2 experienced camera men.

2 marcel-wavers.

6 chemists, Marie La Tour Complexion Powder Co.

2 salesmen, Marie La Tour Turkish Cigarette Co.

16 waiters, Palatial Hotel.

1 traveling man, Marie La Tour Silk Underwear Co.

2 experienced lineotypers, Motion Picture Gazette.

2 experienced pressmen, Motion Picture Gazette.

1 publicity man, experienced, Motion Picture Gazette.

3 fillum cutters.

1 stylish floorman. Must be handsome and refined, not over 30.

Apply Maison Rosabelle, Hats and Gowns.

1 orchestra complete, with leader. Apply "Chez La Tour" (my old joint of parlour-dancing days).

30 chorus men.

2 sparring partners for Madame Griselda, the famous lady-boxer.

And etc, add affinities, as the Romans used to say. And every one a real genuine job paying good money. And getting them nailed was no cinch, believe you me, except, of course, I being such a prominent person I didn't have as much trouble as some would of. Especially where a firm was using my name on something, they could hardly refuse me. I seen everybody personally myself, and only the bosses and in the end n.o.body had turned me down except the one from which I had bought my new bear-cat roadster for Jim's welcome home present and it was _some_ roadster, being neatly finished in pale lavender with yellow running-gear and a narrow red trim and tapestry upholstery on the seats which was so low and easy you involuntarily started to pull up the blankets after you got settled. You know, the kind of a car you have to look up from to see which way the cop is waving.

Well, anyways, you would of thought the bird which had sold it to me for cash money, him being the manager of the luxurious car-corrall himself, would offer to take on some of the boys. But no, he says there was too many auto salesmen in the world already, and that they had ought to be diverted into selling some of the new temperance drinks where their trained imagination would undoubtedly be of great value.

Well, anyways, he was the only one turned me down and I had the slips printed and stored away in a couple of cretone hat-boxes and commenced allotting the victory-note pledges. And then I tripped over the fact that I was a job short. There was the stuff all printed, and a job too short and it the night before the big parade! Well, I decided that when the time come I would make the extra job if I couldn't find it, and believe you me, I was as wore out looking for them as a Ham with his hair cut like a Greenwich village masterpiece. Not that I ever saw one and I have often wondered where the artists which drew them that way, did.

But in the meantime I had got hold of the Dahlia sisters, and Madame Broun and La Estelle, and Queenie King and a lot of other easy-lookers and had it all fixed for them to be on hand below Fourteenth Street at ten o'clock to give out the slips while the boys was mobilizing or whatever they call it. And then just as I was getting into the limousine with Musette and the two cretone hat boxes full and the two fool dogs and Ma, who would come up to me but Ruby Roselle with a new spring set of sables which it is remarkable how she does it in burlesque, still far be it from me to say a word about any person, having been in the theatrical world too long not to realize that it is seldom as red as it is painted and that the coating of black is only on the outside.

Well, anyways, up she comes from her new flat which is only two doors from mine and a awful mean look in those green eyes of hers under a sixty dollar hat that looked it, while mine cost seventy-five and looked fifteen, which is far more refined only Ruby would never believe that: which is one main difference between her and I. And she stopped me with one of those deadly sweet womanly smiles and says in a voice all milk and honey and barbed wire, she says:

"How's this, dearie, about the Theatrical Ladies Committee," she says.

"I only just heard of it from Dottie Dahlia," she says. "What was it made you leave me off?"

Well, seeing that the armistice was not yet broken I felt I might let her distribute a few leaflets, although I had left her name off the signatures at the bottom on account of her never having proved she wasn't a alien enemy to anything besides dramatic art, which hadn't to be proved. So I handed her a string of talk about this being a small affair and how I had thought she would of been too busy to do anything just now, which made her mad because there is some talk on account of that she wasn't working just then. But she took a few leaflets and read the signature at the bottom. "Theatrical Ladies' Welcome Committee" and got real red in the face.

"Why, my friend Mr. Mulvaney spoke to me about this!" she says. "I was to of been treasurer, or something! Do you mean to say you spent ten thousand dollars on _them!"_ and she pointed to the leaflets like a one-act small-time.

"Yep!" I says. "Take 'em home and try 'em on your piano!" I says. "But you will have please to pardon me now. I got to beat it!"

And with that I climbed in with the rest of the family and we was rushed down town to N. Y.'s Bohemian Quarter, where the 70th Division was about to hang around waiting to parade. Which it is certainly remarkable the places the highly moral U. S. A. Government picks out for her soldiers to wait about in say from Paris to Was.h.i.+ngton Square, and I think their wives and sweethearts have stood for a good deal of this sort of thing, to say nothing of wives and sisters being kept from going abroad. I don't know have any homes been broken up this way, but I will say that Marsailles and Harlem would of listened better to the patiently waiting homebodies.

Well, anyways, down we went to the amateur white lights, and by the time we reached Twenty-Third we begun to run into bunches of the boys. Bands was playing and all, and--oh my Gawd, what's the use trying to tell about it? There was plenty to tell, but ain't every one _seen_ it? If not at N. Y. C., why in some town which may be more jay but with its heart in the right place, and the heart is the thing which counted this time as per usual. Believe you me, mine was in my throat and so was everybody elses when they seen them lean brown boys with their grown-up faces!

Well, we stopped down to Eleventh and Sixth and got out and commenced walking around handing out the leaflets, and at first they weren't taking 'em very seriously, but pretty soon they began to get on to who I was and of course that caught them and a good many tucked the slips inside their tin hats and all of them pretty near had seen me in "The Kaiser's Killing" and I got pretty near as big a ovation as I had tried to offer them. And as for the parade they was very good-natured, but it seemed to me that as usual the stay-at-homes in the grandstands was getting the best of it and the boys doing all the work, for parading, no more than a first-cla.s.s dancing act, ain't quite the pleasure to the ones that does it, that it is to them that only stands and waits, as the saying is.

V

The crowds on the Avenue was something fierce, and the only ones which had the right of way, outside of officers and cops, was the motion-picture men. I seen Ted Bearson, my own camera man from the Goldringer Studios, and Rosco, my publicity man, and they was talking together. I stepped back in among the boys, because I wasn't looking for any personal publicity myself on this particular day, wis.h.i.+ng to leave all that to the division and I knew that if Ted was to see me he would shoot me.

But ain't it the truth that the modester a public person like me is, the more attention they attract? My sweet, quiet voice, silent though snappy clothes, and retiring manner have been in Sunday spreads and motion-picture magazine articles practically all over the world and America, and my refinement is my best-known characteristic. Publicity is like men. Leave 'em alone and they simply chase you. Pretend you don't want them, and you can't lose them. And the more reluctant I am about being noticed, the wilder the papers get! Only, of course, without a good publicity man this wouldn't, perhaps, be a perfectly safe bet.

So this day, having got rid of all my leaflets, I was slowly working my way toward the Avenue, when publicity was thrust upon me.

You know this Bohemian part of New York is made up of old houses which is so picturesque through not having much plumbing and so forth and heat being furnished princ.i.p.ally by the talk of the tenants on Bolshevism and etc. These inconveniences makes a atmosphere of freedom and all that and furnishes a district where the shoe-clerk can go and be his true self among the many wild, free spirits from Chicago and all points west.

Well, this neighborhood could stand a lot of repairs, not alone in the personal sense, but in a good many of the buildings, but these are seldom made until interfered with by the police or building departments.

And on the corner of the street which I was now at there was a big old house full of people who _did_ something, I suppose, and these were mostly bursting out through the open windows or sitting on the little balconies which looked like they couldn't hold a flower pot and a pint of milk with any safety much less a human. But there they was, sitting, with all the indifference to fate, for which they are so well known. I couldn't but notice the risk they ran, but I should worry how many radicals are killed, and so I paid but little heed until I noticed that there was three little kids--all ragged children of the dear proletariat--which some of the Bohemians had hauled up on a balcony which was too frail for adults. The minute I see that balcony I was scared to death, although the short-haired girl and the long-haired man which was letting the kids out on it was laughing and care-free as you please. The kids got out all right, and then something awful happened.

Right below was a open s.p.a.ce at the head of this particular column, where the officers and color-bearers and etc was. Rosco and Ted was getting a picture of them. But while I generally watch a camera, this time I didn't on account of watching the kids. And as I looked that rotten old balcony broke and one them, a little girl, fell through and hung there, caught by her skirt, and it a ragged one at that. Everybody screamed and yelled and sort of drew back, which is the first way people act at a horror before they begin to think. I yelled myself, but I started toward her, because the radicals couldn't reach her from above and from below the ground was fully twenty feet away and nothing but a fence with spikes and a dummy window-ledge way to one side. But I had a idea I might make it for what with two generations on the center trapeze and never a drop of liquor and not to mention what I done in pictures, I think quicker than some and act the same. But my new skirt prevented, and ahead of me dashed a soldier.

In a minute he had scaled the wall and worked his way along the spikes to that ledge, and then while the crowd watched breathlessly he had that kid under one arm and was back on the wall again. He held her close, turned around, crouched down and then jumped. And as he jumped I screamed and run forward, for Oh My Gawd, it was Jim!

I don't know how I got there, but when I come to I and that scared kid was all mixed up in his arms and the three of us crying to beat the band which had struck up and the crowd yelling like mad. And it was a peach of a stunt, believe you me.

"Didn't you get my cable?" Jim says. And I says no, and we clinched again. And then we heard a funny, purring sound right behind and broke loose and turned around and there was that devil of a Ted taking a close-up!

"Hold it! d.a.m.n you, hold it another ten feet!" yells Rosco, who was dancing around like a regulation director, just back of Ted. "Fine, Fine! Oh, boy, what a pair of smiles! Say, folks, we shot the whole scene--_some_ News Weekly Feature. Oh say, can you see me, Rosco, _the_ publicity man!"

Honest to Gawd you would of thought he had gone crazy! And that bone-headed crowd couldn't make out was the whole thing staged or real.

Believe you me, I had to pinch myself to know was it real or not, but thank Gawd it was, it was! And after nearly two years! Do you know how that feels? Give a guess! And then, just as I thought now this cruel war and everything is over, why that roughneck of a officer give the order to fall in and of course Jim had to and left me there with that kid in my arms for Ted to make a couple of stills for the papers.

Believe you me, I couldn't tell how many he took, or when, because seeing Jim so sudden and unexpected had pretty near killed me, and I couldn't say anything much about the parade either, because something kept me from seeing it and I guess it was my own glad tears. Anyways, I had three wet handkerchiefs in my bag when I got home and one of them a perfect stranger's.

Well, of course, I expected the parade would break up when it struck Harlem and the boys would hurry right home. And did they? They _did_ not! I hurried right home, all right, all right, but not so Jim. And for a long while I was sitting there in one of my trousseau dresses and a fearful state of mind over what had he done to get killed since I last seen him. But hours went by and still he didn't come. And I didn't know his 'phone or where he was or anything. The only clue I had that the whole business was a fact and no dream was the cable, which had come after he did, saying he would be home as arranged after all.

Believe you me, I hope never to live through another twenty-four hours like them that followed, because I couldn't eat or sleep, not knowing where he was.

Next morning I wouldn't even look at the papers which was Sunday and full of our and the division's pictures. And Monday was worse, because even although Jim might be alive none of the hospitals nor yet the morgue had him, and so I commenced to think he had gone back on me. A telegram come from the coast saying "Great Sunday story bring Rosco contract follows," but what did I care for that stuff without Jim? Ma was very silent all this time, and kept in her room a lot, with the door shut. And then late Monday afternoon the door-bell rung, and my heart leaped to my feet like it had done at every tinkle for 48 hours, and I went myself, but it was only Ruby Roselle and Mr. Mulvaney of the Welcome Home Committee with her! The men that girl knows! Well, she sees them in another light than I and it's a good thing all tastes don't run the same. But this was such a surprise I asked them in before I thought and pretty near forgot my own troubles for a minute.

Ruby cuddled down into her kolinsky wrap and give me the fish-eye, as she addressed me in her own sweet way as a woman to her best enemy.