Chapter VI (2)

Mr. Fizz was equally ready, but his brain continued to function. "Befo' the row commences," he suggested, "le's go drag Opus Randall in heah. He's got plenty beef an' we can use him."

Cæsar grimaced. "He won't fight."

"Then," suggested Eddie calmly, "le's manslaughter him out yonder."

Still whispering, they moved into the alley. From the balcony Sicily and Fernand saw them go--apparently permanently. Sicily rose.

"Le's travel back to the hotel, Fernand."

M. Boutierre was quite willing. He started toward the stairway. Mrs. Clump restrained him.

"Ain't there another way out? My husban' will mos' likely be hangin' around that alley an' I don't crave fo' him to see me."

Fernand admitted that there was another exit, and through this he escorted Sicily from the house. But while they were reaching their decision and making their departure, much was happening in the alley.

The door of the taxi was flung violently open and the terrified Mr. Randall found himself staring into the frigid eyes of Director J. Cæsar Clump. Over Mr. Clump's shoulder he could glimpse the hostile countenances of Florian Slappey and Eddie Fizz. Cæsar spoke.

"Git out of that car, wuthless."

"Whaffo?"

"'Cause you stahted all this. It was you tol' Sicily where I was gwine be at tonight. If you hadn't of been suggestive, she never would of come. Now they has kidnapped her an' is holdin' her prisoner. Us four goes in an' commits a rescue."

Opus alighted, but exhibited marked reluctance. "I--I ain't yearnin' fo' no trouble."

"Boy! yo' yearns don't afflict me none whatsoever. You is in the middle of a whole mess of trouble right now. Inside that house there's li'ble to be a rough-house, an' you does yo' share. Otherwise us th'ee steps on you right heah an' now an' makes you into a pancake."

Opus considered flight and abandoned the idea. He stared at the three men and saw that they were determined and desperate. He tried to appear cheerful. "Well, if you really needs my he'p..."

"Come along. Keep yo' mouf an' yo' fists shut!"

They barged through the front door. The dancing girls were cowering on the stage. The proprietress of the place rushed forward, chattering hysterically in French. And immediately behind her towered the warlike figure of the monster drummer. Cæsar acted as spokesman.

"You got _mon femme en haute_ somewhere," he grated. "Us is gwine fetch her down. An' if this big hunk of cheese here tries to stop me, I'll----"

The Algerian gentleman and lady understood nothing of the situation. They did not connect the dark-skinned tourists with the veiled woman who had recently visited the place. All they could see was that these four men were obviously looking for trouble. Therefore the large man placed himself squarely across the path of J. Cæsar Clump.

To Mr. Clump this was a sinister maneuver. His voice came harshly.

"Out of my way, big boy! I'se gwine _en haute_----"

He put his foot on the first step. Iron fingers closed about his arm and he was jerked roughly aside.

Cæsar struck. He struck straight and hard and his fist spanked against the face of the Algerian. That individual let loose a bellow of rage and astonishment and leaped toward Mr. Clump.

Florian Slappey swung into action. Swiftly and with genuine skill, he executed a flying tackle. Algerian and Birminghamite struck the floor together. At the same instant two flailing figures landed on top of the native. Cæsar and Eddie were small but enthusiastic.

It was then that the fight really started. The girls were shrieking. The fat proprietress flew howling into the street. On the floor four figures milled viciously.

Three against one, but the three were small and the one was a giant. Time after time he staggered to his feet with one or two men hanging to his arms and another punching viciously at his face. And in the background stood the terrified Opus Randall, too cowed to fight and entirely too scared to run. Once, from the melee, came Florian's voice----

"Git in heah, Opus. Us needs you!"

And Opus's honest answer. "I--I'se scared, Florian. You-all is doin' fine without me."

The voice of Mr. Fizz came back, expressing his opinion of Mr. Randall. Mr. Fizz was doing himself proud. He and his two friends were taking a fine beating, but they were inflicting more than a bit of punishment at the same time. They were now up, now down; benches and tables were knocked over; the native was roaring with rage ... the three slender Birmingham negroes fought silently and desperately.

The tide of battle ebbed and flowed. It was an epic encounter; numbers against might--a trio of Lilliputians at grips with a dark-skinned Gulliver. And just when the battle was at its fiercest, when it was anybody's victory--or nobody's--the door was flung open and a weeping proprietress entered in the wake of two businesslike gendarmes.

The voice of authority rang through the room. The two efficient figures surged into the middle of the battle and dragged the contestants apart. Then words began to fly.

The four men presented a sorry spectacle. Cæsar, Florian and Eddie were clad in rags, their faces resembled a boy's nightmare of a trip through an abattoir. The Algerian was scarcely any better. His clothing, too, was torn; his face pounded out of shape and his whole body bruised. Only Opus Randall showed no scars of battle ... and even in their rage Florian and Eddie found time to express their opinion of him.

The woman and the drummer explained that they knew no reason for the disturbance. J. Cæsar struggled in his best French to explain that his wife was being held prisoner in the house. But they could not understand him, and so--struggling and protesting--he and Eddie and Florian and Opus ... the latter screaming his innocence ... were dragged to the police station.

It was a sadly bedraggled trio which confronted the sergeant at headquarters. But fortunately an interpreter was on duty and through him Cæsar explained what it was all about. The interpreter had heard of the movie company and had no reason to doubt the story told, although he made it quite clear that the Americans were laboring under a misapprehension. The house, he affirmed, was eminently respectable and safe.

The quartet was dismissed from custody. Then the interpreter and a gendarme went with them to the dancing establishment. They searched the place and when the interpreter explained whom they were seeking, the fat woman told them she had long since departed. Cæsar assuaged her grief with two one-hundred franc notes and profound apologies. Then he caused the interpreter to question her. The result was somewhat startling.

"She say," explained the interpreter, "that the lady who was here is Arab lady and not no American."

Florian, Cæsar and Eddie exchanged significant glances. Opus caught their meaning and hastened to speak.

"That was Sicily," he announced. "I'se sure of it."

"How come you is so sure?"

Mr. Randall found himself between the devil and the deep sea. "I just got a hunch," he affirmed. "I don't know nothin' fo' certain, but I'se positive anyhow."

They took Opus with them into the alley and bundled him into the taxi. The machine bumped and rolled down the narrow, ill-lighted, cobblestoned thoroughfare and the three participants in the recent battle groaned with each agonizing jerk of the antiquated machine.

Opus cowered in the corner. He felt that all was not as it should be. Instinct informed him that the end was not yet, and that he had erred in attempting to wreak revenge on Cæsar.

During the ride through the French quarter and thence toward the upper reaches of the city where their hotel was located, the three battlers spoke little and groaned much, but such words as dropped from their lips were fraught with unpleasant promise for Mr. Randall.

Eventually they swung in through the big iron gates, rolled under the trees that lined the hotel garden and came to a stop before the front door.

The trio of battered figures dragged themselves up the steps, completely surrounding the harried Opus. They moved into the lobby--where a picture of utter serenity presented itself.

Seated in an easy-chair, immersed in a London magazine, was Sicily Clump. She was calm and quiet and unruffled as she swept the newcomers with a curious gaze.

Cæsar started forward, his tone indicative of relief.

"Honeybunch!" he exulted, "you is safe!"

"What you mean, Cæsar? Safe?"

"Nothin' happened to you, did it?"

A slow smile creased Sicily's lips. She had determined to torture her husband with uncertainty.

"How come anythin' should occur to me, Mistuh Clump?"

Cæsar frowned. "Has you been out anywhere?"

And Sicily, mistress of the situation, shook her head.

"Goodness, no! I ain't been out of this hotel all evenin'."

A solemn and terrible hush fell upon the trio of slim young men who had lately been locked in deadly combat with a large and muscular drum-beater.

With one accord they turned and inspected the cringing Opus Randall. He started to speak, but before the words came, the others acted.

They acted efficiently, positively and immediately. Two arms hooked into Opus's and he found himself propelled into the darkness of the hotel gardens. An awful thought occurred to him--there swept over him the knowledge that no matter what developed he was in a horrid predicament.

They escorted him outside and surrounded him. Then, with ghastly ostentation, Cæsar, Eddie and Florian shed their torn coats and rolled up their sleeves.

Their eyes blazed with a fine and righteous light.

"Us is about to pufform a sweet duty," remarked Mr. Slappey casually.

Mr. Clump's voice carried slightly more bitterness. "An' all on account of this feller," he grated. "It was bad enough when us thought we was rescuin' Sicily. But to find out she never lef' this hotel, an' that we got beat up over some woman we don't even know..."

Opus stared wild-eyed from one to the other. He felt that it were better that the truth be known--far better than that they should think he had invented the entire story.

He knew he must convince them that Sicily had actually left the hotel to visit the dancing establishment.

His eye lighted on the bruised figure of Director Edwin Boscoe Fizz. Mr. Fizz could prove his case....

"Eddie!" he wailed, "you know good an' well Sicily lef' this hotel tonight. You seen her go! Please, suh, tell these fellers that you know I is speakin' the truth."

Mr. Fizz caressed his biceps. Terror still sat largely upon him and he burned with indignation. The others moved closer. It became terribly apparent to Mr. Randall that his only hope for mercy lay with Mr. Fizz. If Eddie chose to testify that he spoke the truth about Sicily's absence ...

"Eddie! Please... Don't you remember seein' Sicily Clump leave the hotel in the taxi?"

Eddie stared thoughtfully.

Then he doubled his fists and nodded to Cæsar and Florian.

He addressed the cringing Mr. Randall--and his words shattered that gentleman's last forlorn hope.

"When that big drummer walloped me on the jaw," announced Mr. Fizz, "he knocked my memory plumb loose!"

THE SIXTH McNALLY

_By_ Montague Glass

MONTAGUE GLASS

I think it is not generally known that Montague (Marsden) Glass was born in Manchester, England, on July 23, 1877, and came to America at the age of thirteen. Once here, he was educated at the College of the City of New York and New York University, and in a dozen more years or so was famous as the author of the Potash and Perlmutter stories. Perhaps no fictional characters of our generation have enjoyed so extensive a popularity.

"The Sixth McNally" is from Mr. Glass's book, _Y' Understand_.

THE SIXTH McNALLY[1]

[1] Copyright, 1925, by Doubleday, Page & Company. Copyright, 1921, by International Publications, Inc.

"Yes, Mr. Leonard," Gershon Danowitz said as he sat in the office of J.J. Leonard, manager, producer, and personal director of the "Comics of 1913 to 1919," both inclusive--"yes, Mr. Leonard, your poor father _olav hasholom_, Sam Lippmann, had me down right. 'Danowitz,' he used to say, 'the trouble with you is that you are all heart,' he used to say. 'If some one is in trouble or misfortune,' he used to say, 'you are right there,' he used to say, and certainly he was right."

Mr. Leonard nodded perfunctorily.

"The old man was a big jollier," he said.

"And a wonderful judge from character," Danowitz added, "which when he resigned from the presidency of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indignant Females, Mr. Leonard, he says to me, 'Danowitz,' he says to me, 'you are my successor,' he says to me, 'and I know how it is with a man like you,' he says. 'You will want to do the whole thing yourself,' he says. 'You will be giving a thousand dollars _here_, a thousand dollars _there_, and the first thing you know, you will be practically supporting that Home out of your own pocket,' he says. 'So don't be afraid to ask my son to get up an annual benefit,' he says, and I says that while it ain't in my nature to ask favors for myself, y'understand, if that was his wish and desire, I says, _auch recht_, I says, which if Sunday evening February eleventh would be convenient to you, Mr. Leonard, it would be convenient to me."

Mr. Leonard sighed heavily. "This'll be the fifth annual benefit I give for them rotten females," he declared.

"And you could depend on it, Mr. Leonard," Danowitz said, piously, "that your poor father, _olav hasholom_, which when he was alive was a _tzadik_ if ever there was one, knows about these here benefits you are giving for the Home, and appreciates it."

"Maybe he appreciates that it has cost me on an average, $425.20 for lights, ushers, orchestra, and advertising," Leonard retorted, "not to say nothing about cleaning the theater and a full stage crew at regular union rates. So I am giving you this straight, Mr. Danowitz; next year you've got to get some one else to get up this here benefit, because this is positively the last time I am going to get stung for it."

He lifted the receiver from the telephone. "See if Al Sands of Sands & McNally is out there, and don't let nobody else in till you find who they are first. That was what my instructions was the first day I hired you.... What's that? ... Is _that_ so! I suppose you didn't let in a party a few minutes ago what I thought was Manowitz the _costoomer_, and it turns out to be somebody else."

As he banged the receiver back on its hook, he fixed Danowitz with a venomous glare. It did not, however, noticeably disturb the expression of benevolence which, as president of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females, Danowitz habitually wore.

"Well, I guess I would be moving on," the philanthropist remarked, with precisely the same inflection as though he anticipated being pressed to remain for anyhow twenty minutes; "which if there is anything you would like to ring me up about, don't hesitate to trespass on my time."

His manner was graciousness itself as he cuddled Leonard's resisting hand in a warm clasp of farewell, and when he passed out of the room, a less adamant person than Leonard might have been left with the impression that to share in benevolent enterprises of so admirable a character, even to the extent of $425.20, was a privilege and an honor. Leonard, however, did not see it that way, and he was still muttering to himself when Al Sands, the male partner of the old-established team of Sands & McNally, entered the room.

"You ain't got no objections if I bring a couple of sandwiches along the next time, J.J.?" Al said, by way of giving himself what he considered to be a good speech to come on with. "I've been waiting outside since ten o'clock."

"Always clowning, ain't you, Al?" Leonard retorted. "Why don't you get some of that comedy into your performance? Because if you don't get no more laughs in this year's 'Comics' than you did in last year's, I've got to make some different arrangements, that's all. And as for McNally----"

"I know, I know," Sands interrupted. "But I ain't got that McNally no longer. The McNally I've got this year is a wonder."

"That's what you said last year," Leonard declared. "In fact, this'll be the sixth McNally you've had since you and me has been doing business together, Al, and they've been going down steadily. The one you had last year was the worst of the bunch."

"Sure, I know, but _that_ McNally was Irish," Sands explained. "She's the only Irish McNally I ever had, and that's where I made a big mistake. The McNally I've got this year is all right, J. J. She's got a wonderful voice, good dancer, and she's right there in three dialects."

"And on your say-so, unsight unseen, without letting the cat out of the bag or nothing, you want me to give you a contract, I suppose," Leonard said.

"I ain't trying to keep no cat in a bag," Al said. "When do you want me to bring her up here?"

"I don't want you to bring her up here never," Leonard replied. "I'm giving a benefit for a home for females--the one I always give the benefit for, on account of my father once being the president of it, on Sunday night February eleventh--and if _they_ like her, _I'll_ like her."

"You couldn't tell nothing by a benefit audience," Al Sands protested.

"Benefit or no benefit," Leonard declared, "if the people out front pays three dollars apiece for an orchestra seat, y'understand, they ain't going to laugh unless the laugh is there."

He turned to a desk heaped high with manuscripts of plays whose fate had long since been sealed by the circumstance that Leonard produced nothing but his annual revue. He utilized them, nevertheless, in the reception and dismissal of visitors; and by way of informing Al Sands that his visit was at an end Leonard immediately became absorbed in the title page and _dramatis personæ_ of a thick manuscript bound in blue vellum paper. To any other manager, its inordinate length would have made it impossible, because, reckoning that one page of manuscript consumes one minute in its performance, there were eight hours and twenty-five minutes of solid drama contained within its covers; but for J.J. Leonard's purposes, this was, if anything, an advantage.

Thus, at the beginning of the season, when obscure members of the "Comics" Company would summon up sufficient courage to call on Leonard with a request for more salary, the impression they received from discovering their employer in the perusal of so weighty a manuscript was not at all dispelled by the noise with which Leonard closed it and threw it back on his desk. It frequently banged twenty dollars a week off a timid actor's salary, and was therefore Leonard's favorite manuscript.

"I suppose I get anyhow one orchestra rehearsal," Al Sands said, with his hand on the door knob.

"Saturday morning at eleven downstairs," J.J. said, without looking up.

The manuscript was called "Death and Transfiguration" and suggested in its treatment Tolstoy's "Resurrection" with just a hint of "Twin Beds," but for anything Leonard had learned of its contents, it might just as well have been a combination of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Oh, Boy!" All he knew about it was that his father, Sam Lippmann, had brought it into the office and asked him to read it when he found the time; and although as the resolution of the Board of Trustees of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females had so aptly put it, an all-wise Providence had gathered Sam unto his fathers some three years before, J.J. had still not found the time. Nevertheless, out of respect for his father he continued to believe that he was going to find the time some time or other, and he periodically instructed his secretary to notify the author that his manuscript was under consideration by Mr. Leonard and a decision would be rendered upon it in due course.

These notifications were all sent to Gerald Dane, care of The Fitgood Shirt Company, 22A Washington Place, New York City; and while it may seem a piece of pure coincidence that, half an hour after the incidents above set forth, Gershon Danowitz entered the Washington Place factory of the Fitgood Shirt Company, it may be readily explained upon the score that he was the sole proprietor of it and that Gerald Dane labored there under the shirt-business name of Gershon Danowitz, Jr.

"Well," Gershon, Jr., demanded impatiently before his father had time to remove his hat and coat, "did you ask him about it?"

The proprietor of the Fitgood Shirt Company and President of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females immediately lost his benevolent manner and became livid with rage.

"What do you mean--did I ask him?" he bellowed. "It ain't enough that I am insulted about the benefit already. I should ask him about your _verflüchte Schauspiel_ yet!"

He tore off his hat and coat and threw them on to a chair.

"Sam Lippmann, that was a friend!" he cried. "I should ought to of been shot before I ever met that old crook, _olav hasholom_. Throws the whole burden of them fakers of females on my shoulders and then he goes to work and encourages my only son that he should be a play writer yet!"

"Now look here, pop," Gershon, Jr., protested. "There isn't any need to get so excited."

"Isn't there?" Gershon, Sr., began. "Well, let me tell you something, Gershon. Once and for all I want you to get through with this nonsense. You have been fooling away your time here long enough. Either you must got to be a play writer _oder_ a shirt manufacturer, but you couldn't be both, y'understand."

He had been delivering the same ultimatum at intervals of a week or so for more than three years, and it had always been accepted by Gershon, Jr., as incidental to the avocation of dramatist and to be dismissed with some such rejoinder as "Hire a hall!" or even, in less respectful moments, "Tell it to Sweeney." But on this occasion Gershon, Jr., maintained what his father ought to have recognized as an ominous silence; for only the night before, while dining on West Houston Street, somebody at the next table had audibly informed a female companion that the feller with the spectacles and that leather sample case--don't look now--was the one that wrote all them shows for them now Washington Square actors. And although the female companion was extremely rustic in her appearance and said, "What! That homely looking feller with the long hair?" the incident had fired his imagination, nevertheless.

"Because when a young feller gets to be already twenty-six years old, he ain't a child no longer," Gershon, Sr., continued, his philanthropic manner beginning to reassert itself. He intended it to be a heart-to-heart conversation such as any president of any home might hold with a thoughtless son in whom there wasn't, so to speak, a button's worth of harm, and to that end settled himself comfortably in the revolving chair at his office desk; but Gershon, Jr., refused to perform in the role assigned to him.

"I know I ain't," he said with a firmness that ought to have warned Gershon, Sr.

"You bet your life you ain't," Gershon, Sr., went on, just as though he were not addressing a dramatist who only the night before had been mistaken for the author of the entire Washington Square Players repertoire. "And when a feller gets to be twenty-six years old in any business--particularly the shirt business----"

"To hell with the shirt business!" Gershon, Jr., exclaimed.

If a spectator had arisen in the body of the Supreme Court at Washington and said the same thing about the Constitution of the United States the combined bench and bar there present could have been no more shocked than Gershon, Sr., was. For at least a minute he sat in his office chair unable to move, unable even to enunciate; but at last he tottered to his feet.

"Go on," he said, "out of here, before I kick you out."

"You wouldn't kick anybody out," Gershon, Jr., retorted. "For three years now I've sat and listened to you giving advice, and I ain't going to stand for it any longer."

"And for how many years did he sit and listen to you cutting teeth and having colic?" inquired a stout, florid gentleman in a fur overcoat. He had entered the office unnoticed at the very moment of Gershon, Jr.'s sacrilegious outbreak against the shirt industry, and although shirts were only one department of the Gembitz-Jones Mercantile Company's jobbing business in Los Angeles, Marcus Gembitz was hardly less shocked than Gershon, Sr., himself. "Ain't you ashamed to talk that way to your father?"

He might just as well have asked Trotzky and Lenin if they weren't ashamed to speak disrespectfully about such decent, estimable people as the Russian bourgeoisie, for in the lexicon of a Greenwich Village dramatist, derived in great measure from the prefaces to the published plays of Bernard Shaw, there are no such words as respect for parents. In fact, even in that crucial moment--the turning point of a career, as it were--when Gershon, Jr., was putting on his hat and coat preparatory to abandoning the shirt business forever, he could not help snorting contemptuously at such a hopelessly old-fashioned remark.

"Here!" Gershon, Sr., demanded. "Where are you going?"

For answer Gershon, Jr., crushed his hat over his forehead. It was a black, soft hat--essentially a dramatist's hat and not a shirt-manufacturer's hat. And then looking around the office, much as the Prisoner of Chillon must have looked around his dungeon at the moment of liberation--if he ever was liberated--he opened the door, and the next moment it closed behind him with a bang. Indeed, had it closed with a clang instead of a bang, the effect could not have been more dramatic.

"_Nu_, Danowitz," Marcus Gembitz said at last, "don't worry your head. He'll come back."

"I don't want him to come back," Gershon, Sr., said. "He's made his bed. Now he could rot in it for all I care."

Gembitz waved his hands in deprecation of such harshness.

"Say!" he said. "You'll get over that feeling." He patted Danowitz's shoulder consolingly. "After all," he continued, "we all have trouble with our children and it comes out all right."

"With children maybe, but with an only child, Mr. Gembitz, that's something else again," Danowitz said. His head nodded slowly as he began to realize the bereavement he had suffered.

"Mind you," he went on, "I begged his mother she shouldn't send him to college, because if you have two sons and one of them goes to college, supposing something happens to you, _Gott soll hüten_, you've anyhow one left to look after the business, but if you've got only one son and him a college gradgewate, y'understand, what is it? Am I right or wrong?"

"Couldn't a college gradgewate also run a business?" Gembitz inquired.

"In some business, _maybe_," Danowitz said. "But in a business where there is such a competition like the shirt business, Mr. Gembitz, such business you've got to learn it from the bottom up, whereas a college gradgewate learns a business from the top down, and while some college gradgewates reaches the bottom quicker as others, y'understand, when such a college gradgewate is also a play writer, before he has learned even the top of the business, understand me, the bottom has dropped out of it."

"Even so," Gembitz said, "you've got to make allowances for your boy."

"I would never forgive him--never," Danowitz said emphatically.

"Say!" Gembitz protested. "I would make you a bet right now that in less than two weeks the young feller would be back on the job and you would never think nothing had happened at all. Forgiving children is the easiest thing fathers could do. Why, you take me, for instance, Danowitz, and the troubles which you got with your boy ain't already a marker to what I got with my daughter, which I told my wife how it would come out if she lets her take vocal.

"'Learn her first to make a decent cup of coffee,' I says to my wife, 'or that she should cook _chotzig_ a potato,' I says.

"But you know how it is in Los Angeles, Danowitz. Everybody figures that if their daughter ain't got no other talent, she looks like Mary Pickford; and my wife has settled in her mind that my Sadie has only got to take for twelve hundred dollars singing lessons to be a second Geraldine Patti, y'understand. Right now she is in Chicago staying with her aunt and taking vocal from an _Italiener_, which he has got the nerve to charge more for one office call than a first-class A-number-one stomach specialist."

"Well, that's the way it goes," Gershon, Sr., declared, with a tremulous sigh. "I've got a good business and nobody to leave it to but the boy, and nothing would do but that he must be a play writer _doch_. You have got an only daughter which you are well fixed enough that she could have a good husband and a good home, and I suppose the first thing you know, you would be firing her out of the house for getting a job singing in a moving-picture theayter or something."

"Say!" Gembitz remarked. "The girl is very far from reaching that point, y'understand, but if she did, understand me, firing her out of the house would be the furthest from my thoughts. Hafter all, Danowitz, children has got their rights as well as parents, and if your son or my daughter thinks they've got openings above the shirt business or the home, y'understand, the thing to do is to look at the matter from philosophy."

Once more he patted Danowitz's shoulder.

"Now come, Danowitz," he said, "this here business about your Gershon is going to blow over, and in the meantime I would like to see what you've got in some popular-price percales. My reservations for Los Angeles is all taken for tomorrow, and I ain't got no time to lose."

For more than an hour Gershon, Sr., displayed his spring line of shirts, and in spite of his broken-hearted condition succeeded in procuring from Gembitz a most satisfactory order at prices slightly above the market, since Gembitz could not find it within his ordinarily businesslike nature to add to Danowitz's troubles by standing out for bedrock figures. In fact, once or twice Gembitz suspected that Danowitz was taking advantage of a customer's kindness of heart by sandwiching rather extravagant quotations between two outbursts of emotion at his son's ungrateful behavior. But Gembitz's sympathy for Danowitz, as of one father for another, outweighed the trade antagonism which as a jobber he would normally have felt toward a manufacturer, and he allowed Danowitz to get away with a couple of items which upon mature reflection he considered to be little short of grand larceny. Nevertheless, after checking up the order and correcting a few mistakes which Danowitz in his grief had made in his own favor, the two parents shook hands warmly.

"You will see, Danowitz," Gembitz declared, "that your boy will be back here in a few days, and you and him will be just as good friends as ever."

"Him with me, maybe," Danowitz said, "but not me with him."

"_Ach_! That's nonsense!" Gembitz exclaimed. He was about to enlarge upon the amount of forgiveness which a parent ought to display to an erring child, when the telephone bell rang.

"Excuse me," Danowitz said, taking the receiver from the hook. "Hello.... Yes, this is the Fitgood Shirt Company. Hello.... Mister Who? ... Yes, he's right here."

He turned to Gembitz.

"For you, Mr. Gembitz," he said.

"For me?" Gembitz cried. "Why, nobody knows I'm here, excepting I told the twentieth-floor clerk at the hotel she should ring me up here in case a package didn't come from my tailor, but the package came just as I left. I wonder who it would be?"

"Might if you answered the phone, maybe you would find out," Danowitz suggested.

"Give it to me," Gembitz said. "Hello.... Yes, this is Mr. Gembitz.... You are the twentieth-floor clerk, yes? ... You got a what? ... What kind of wire? ... A telegram? ... Sure, go ahead and open it."

He smiled at Danowitz.

"Ain't it funny, when you get a telegram, you always think sickness or death and it turns out to be nothing," he said. "Probably my partner is---- Oh, hello! ... Yes, I'm listening.... It's from Chicago.... Yes, I understand--Chicago.... Mrs. Clarence Fimpel. That's my wife's sister.... Yes, go ahead.... What? ... _Shema Beni_! What do you think of that?"

He hung up the receiver and stared at Danowitz while his florid complexion grew suddenly purple.

"Mr. Gembitz!" Danowitz exclaimed. "What's the matter? Is somebody sick or something?"

Gembitz flipped his right hand in a gesture of despair.

"Worser," he said. "My Sadie has run away to be an actress."

"An actress?" Danowitz repeated.

"The telegram says, 'Sadie in New York, threatens go on stage, stop her,' signed Mrs. Clarence Fimpel," Gembitz said. "And she don't even give the telephone number in New York where Sadie threatens to go on the stage."

"Don't it say letter follows?" Danowitz asked. "Most telegrams do, and usually you couldn't tell nothing about it till the letter arrives."

"I don't care if fifty letters follows," Gembitz declared, striking the desk with his clenched fist. "If the girl wants to go on the stage, she can go."

He rose from the chair on which he was sitting and looked as though he were about to raise both hands in the classic gesture that used to accompany all parental curses with or without a snowstorm off stage.

"But if she does," he said, "she'll never see a penny of my money--not one penny."

He sank back into his chair and covered his eyes with his right hand.

"A shame and a disgrace!" he muttered. "My only daughter to be an actress!"

Danowitz shrugged his shoulders.

"Say!" he said. "Lots of girls from good families has threatened to go on the stage and even went. Hafter all, what is so terrible that your daughter should be an actress, Mr. Gembitz? An actress could behave herself the same like anybody else and very often does."

"She should never come near my house again," Gembitz said with a groan.

"Schmooes!" Danowitz exclaimed. "If the girl makes a hit on the stage, you will be proud of her the same like any other father."

He patted Gembitz's back reassuringly, but Gembitz only shook his head.

"You don't know me, Danowitz. When I make up my mind, I make up my mind," he concluded. "And I would never forgive her--never."

The passage of a camel through the eye of a needle or of a rich man into Heaven is a relatively easy matter compared with the admission of an aspiring playwright to the presence of a manager, and when Gershon Danowitz, Jr., called at the office of J.J. Leonard on the following Saturday morning, it was only because Leonard failed to notice the Jr. on Gershon's visiting card that he succeeded in getting an audience.

"Tell that faker to come in here," Leonard said to the office boy who brought it in. "I want to talk to him."

He almost bit his cigar in two as he framed in sufficiently strong language just how he was going to break to the president of the Bella Hirschkind Home for Indigent Females that if one-half of the increased expenses of running off the benefit were not forthcoming from the treasury of the Home, there wasn't going to be any benefit at all.

"Now, looky here, Danowitz," he began, as Gershon, Jr., entered, and then broke off suddenly when he discovered that his visitor was not the person he supposed him to be. "Say! Who let you in here?" he bellowed.

It is hardly necessary to say that the question was embroidered with profanity selected at random from a particularly rich vocabulary, and for a moment Gershon, Jr., forgot that he was no longer the manager of a prosperous shirt business.

"Who do you think you're talking to--a shipping clerk?" he asked. "I sent in my card, and your boy told me to come in."

Leonard picked up the card and looked at it again.

"Oh, you're the old man's son," he said.

"I'm not any man's son," Gershon replied. "I'm here on my own account."

It was at this juncture that he saw his play on Leonard's desk.

"I called to see you about this," he said. Forthwith the habits of five years spent in the shirt business began to assert themselves. What he held in his hand seemed to him not a manuscript but a shirt, a high-grade shirt--in fact, an entire line of high-grade shirts--and he addressed himself to the task of selling it to Leonard, much as if Leonard had been a retailer with a chain of haberdashery stores and hence a prospective customer of large buying capacity. It was an entirely novel experience for the theatrical manager. He had met brash playwrights, shy playwrights, intellectual playwrights, and playwrights who were acquainted with every device of the theater since the days of Corneille and Racine, but a playwright who was also a first-class, cracker jack, A-number-one shirt salesman was something he had never been called upon to cope with, and he was soon completely at Gershon's mercy.

For more than an hour his only contributions to the dialogue were, "But, say!" or "Now, listen here," all of which Gershon treated as mere punctuation. In disposing of this one manuscript, he was using enough salesmanship to sell shirts in gross lots, and he talked on and on to such good purpose that by twelve o'clock, not only had he caused Leonard to accept in writing "Death and Transfiguration," a play in three acts and a prologue by Gerald Dane, but they had also discussed its forthcoming production to the extent of changing its title to "Early to Bed," merging the prologue into the first act and cutting between the laughs so as to bring its acting time well within the conventional period of one hundred and thirty minutes.

"And now," Gershon, Jr., said, shortly before half-past twelve, "we'll go out and have a bit of lunch."

Leonard looked at his watch and impiously uttered a pious exclamation.

"I've got a rehearsal downstairs," he said.

"All right, I'll go with you," Gershon remarked, and a few minutes later Leonard vaguely wondered why he was not surprised to find himself seated side by side with Gershon, Jr., in one of the last rows on the ground floor of the Cabot Theater. An orchestra of less than ten musicians--using the term in its occupational and not its artistic meaning--was playing an accompaniment to a song in which the word "Dixie" recurred at intervals. So far as it affected Gershon, however, it might just as well have been Bosnia or Herzegovina, for he was concerned not with the song but the singer. He clutched Leonard's arm convulsively.

"Who's the lady?" he asked in a shrill whisper.

"What lady?" Leonard asked in return. "Lady" was a word he reserved for members of the audience. For performers, whether as principals or chorus women, he possessed a fund of synonyms which had never been included in any thesaurus. "Oh, _her_!" he exclaimed, when he realized that he was sitting next to a layman. "She's one of them--now--McNallys."

"Yes?" Gershon said. He had, of course, heard of such theatrical families as the Drews, the Barrymores, and even the Eight Brothers Byrne, but, even though he was not prepared to admit it, he had never heard of the McNally family.

"Which one is she?" he asked, as though he knew all the others.

"She's the fifth or the sixth," Leonard said. "I forget which."

"The sixth," a voice said from the seat back of them, "and the best of the bunch, J.J."

"But she can't sing for nuts, Al," Leonard replied, without looking around.

"Of course, I'm no judge of singing," Gershon began, by way of protest, but he immediately became silent at a warning nudge from Leonard.

"She ain't got no more voice than I have," Leonard said.

"Say!" Al Sands retorted. "She can put over a song without singing a note. All she's got to do is to stand there, and it's across. Am I right or wrong?"

Leonard clutched Gershon's knee, but this additional warning was entirely unnecessary. Six years of buying and selling made him realize at once that even though Miss McNally combined all the more attractive features of Maxine Elliott, Billie Burke, and Mrs. Mildred Harris Chaplin, these were commodities just as much subject to bargain and sale in the theater as merchandise is in the dry-goods district.

"She's a great performer," Al Sands added, emphatically.

Leonard turned around in his seat.

"What am I--a new beginner?" he asked. "Have I been putting on for seven years now a show where I got to play to twenty-two thousand to break even, without being my own judge of what's good and what ain't?"

These figures, representing the gross weekly receipts of the "Comics," and the profanity with which they were quoted, made such an impression on Al Sands that he was silent for at least thirty seconds.

"She's a big find," he said at last.

"She's a rank amateur," Leonard retorted. "I bet she ain't left her home a month already."

"Well, what _of_ it?" Sands asked. That was just what Gershon wanted to know. Here was a McNally--member, no doubt, of an old theatrical family--in short, the sixth McNally, and yet she was a rank amateur and had just left her home.

"What _of_ it?" Leonard said. "Why, there's _this_ of it: I suppose you expect I should pay you the old figure when all you got to pay _her_ is fifty a week."

"Say!" Al Sands interrupted. "You don't know her or you wouldn't talk that way. _You_ may think she's an amateur and _I_ may think she's an amateur, but _she_ don't think so. She struck me for two hundred right off the reel, and she made me pay it, too."

"Back up!" Leonard cried. "What are you trying to give me?"

"All right," Sands said. "_Meet_ her once."

"All right, I will," Leonard said, jumping up from his seat. He made his way down the side aisle to the door leading from the auditorium to the stage, followed by Al Sands. Gershon stumbled after them through the darkness, quite forgotten by Leonard, but when they all three arrived on the stage, such was the effect of Gershon's late salesmanship that Leonard accepted his presence there as a matter of course.

"Miss McNally," Al said, "I want you to meet Mr. Leonard, and this other gentleman here, I don't know his name."

"He ain't interested," Leonard said, shaking Miss McNally's ungloved hand, and not releasing it after the handshake had concluded. "I think I seen you somewheres before, didn't I?"

"I don't think so," Miss McNally replied.

"Good speaking voice," Sands commented. "Great carrying quality."

"Now, listen," Leonard broke in. "Let her do the talking, will you?"

Miss McNally withdrew her hand from Leonard's clasp.

"Mr. Sands does the talking _for_ me," she said. She looked at Gershon and thereby caused him to undergo all the cardiac symptoms associated with too much smoking and coffee-drinking. Nevertheless, he seemed to detect a slight flicker of Miss McNally's left eyelid.

"I suppose," Leonard said, "Al told you to tell me that."

"What's the difference who told who?" Sands asked. "As a matter of fact, she suggested it."

"Miss McNally," Leonard broke in angrily, "I want you to come upstairs to my office. I'm starting to cast my 'Comics' and I want to talk business to you."

"The act is Sands and McNally, Mr. Leonard," Sands said. "I own and manage it, and if you want to talk business, talk it to me."

For at least half a minute Leonard hesitated.

Miss McNally's physical charms were no less evident to him than they were to Gershon, but unlike Gershon, his heart functioned quite normally. So did his brain. He was, in fact, considering her attractiveness in terms of box-office receipts, and at the end of thirty seconds he had made up his mind.

"Come upstairs, Al," he said, and a minute later Gershon was alone on the stage with Miss McNally.

"Well," Miss McNally declared, "if he lands that job in the 'Comics,' I guess I'll have burned my boats behind me and not a cent of insurance."

Her lips parted in a melancholy smile and Gershon smiled in return.

He had only half heard what she had said, but Al Sands was right. All she had to do was to stand there, and she was a hit with any audience. For instance, she had not intended to create in Gershon the feeling that without a home presided over by Miss McNally, play writing and shirt manufacturing were as one. Nevertheless, merely by standing there and looking at him, she had done more than that. Her melancholy smile had automatically caused him to contrast the hazardous compensation of a playwright with the relatively certain income of the shirt-manufacturing business. In short, he was considering her attractiveness, not by Leonard's standard of box-office receipts, but in terms of a honeymoon, a small apartment in a good neighborhood, and just one or two children, and by the time she spoke again he was rapidly getting back into a shirt-business frame of mind.

"You look like you didn't understand what I mean," she said, "so I may as well tell you that I left a good home to go into this."

Gershon held out his right hand.

"Shake!" he said. "I've just burned a couple of fleets myself."

They shook hands solemnly.

"And one or two bridges," Gershon added.

"You don't mean to say that _you_ left a good home to be an actor?" she asked, after they were seated side by side on a tool box against the back wall.

"Not an actor," Gershon said; "a playwright, and I left more than a good home. I left a good shirt business."

"A good shirt business!" she exclaimed. "Oh, dear! Wasn't that foolish of you!"

She laid her left hand on his right sleeve and let it stay there for just a moment.

"Why couldn't you write plays on the side and still stay in the shirt business?" she said.

"Ask my father," Gershon replied. "He owns the business, and he told me that I had to choose between being a shirt manufacturer and a playwright, so I chose."

Miss McNally nodded her head comprehendingly.

"Aren't families just like that?" she said. "They don't understand you one bit, do they?"

She moved up just a trifle closer to him.

"Tell me," she said. "What kind of plays do you write?"

"Suppose I tell you at lunch," Gershon said. "It'll be half an hour or longer before Leonard gets through with your--your friend."

"He isn't my friend," Miss McNally assured him. "He pays me a salary and I board with him and Mrs. Sands up in Tremont."

"Even at that, we could leave word with the doorman that we would be back in half an hour," Gershon said. "How about it?"

Miss McNally considered the proposition for at least a minute.

"How many plays have you produced?" she asked.

"As yet, none," Gershon said, "but I've had one accepted."

"Then I'll go to lunch with you on one condition," Miss McNally declared. "There's an awfully nice place right across the street where they have the best Danish pastry."

And a moment later they were seated at a rear table in one of those lunch rooms that seek to divert their patrons' attention from the poor quality of the food by an elaborate scheme of decoration in the style of an 1895 model Pullman Palace Car.

There over a plate of Danish pastry and two cups of coffee they exchanged the preliminary confidences of what was rapidly to ripen into an ardent friendship. In fact, so rapid was the ripening and so ardent the friendship that, by the following Thursday, not only had they lunched together five times and dined together six times, but in the course of the last dinner Miss McNally had occasion to say, "No." To be sure she didn't say it too emphatically. Her precise words were: "No, Gerald dear, I couldn't. Not this season, anyway."

"But, I tell you, I'll go back into the shirt business. I'll do anything," he protested.

"Don't I know you would?" Miss McNally said. "But I have a contract with Mr. Sands not to get married for the run of the 'Comics,' anyway."

"And it may run two years," he said, hopelessly.

"Well, that can't be helped," she said. "My contract with him says I shouldn't get married and I can't break it."

That she was firm in this resolution, however, may be doubted by the events of the following morning, when Gershon Danowitz, Sr., was interrupted in the task of checking up his monthly statements by a visitor whose clothes could not have been called conservative even for a man half his age.

"Say, looky here!" the visitor said to Gershon, Sr. "This thing has gone far enough. Is that plain?"

Gershon, Sr., was startled into a pious expectoration.

"T'phooee!" he said. "What do you mean, busting in here like this?"

"I mean what I say," Al Sands declared. "It's got to stop. I know what my rights are, and this wouldn't be the first time I made trouble for a guy like that."

"Say, what's the matter?" Gershon asked. "Are you _meshugga_ or something?"

"I ain't no more crazy than you are," Al said. "I've got a contract for the run of the 'Comics'--me and my partner--and if your son busts it up on me, my lawyers tell me I can put him in jail for malicious interfering in a contract."

For a brief interval Danowitz nodded his head while a pulse beat in his cheek.

"So that's what it is, is it?" he said. "Already he gets into trouble."

"And he'll get into worser trouble if he fools with me," Sands commented.

"That I couldn't help," Danowitz rejoined. "I ain't seen the boy in a week and what he is up to, I don't know."

"Well, I can tell you what he is up to," Sands told him. "He's threatening to marry my partner."

"Your partner!" Danowitz repeated. "What for a business are you in that you get a lady partner? The millinery business?"

"I ain't in _no_ business," Sands replied. "My name is Sands, of Sands and McNally, my own act now for ten years, and your son is going to marry my partner Miss McNally."

The pulse in Danowitz's cheek beat a trifle more quickly and he grew slightly red in the face, but his voice was firm enough when he spoke, even though his lips did quiver.

"Well," he said, "I didn't expect no better. Anyone what starts out writing plays when he's got a good home and a good business, is liable to end up marrying a Miss McNally, even."

"And how about me?" Sands asked.

"You?" Danowitz said. "What have I got to do with you?"

"You've got plenty to do with me," Sands retorted. "Either you stop this thing or I put your son in jail."

Danowitz rose from his chair.

"You mean you are going to put into jail the young feller that is going to marry this Miss McNally?" he said.

Al Sands nodded.

"Well, that young feller ain't my son," Danowitz declared. "I ain't got no more a son."

For more than half an hour after Sands left, Danowitz remained seated in his revolving chair, his head sunk on his breast, and it was in this attitude that Marcus Gembitz found him when he entered the office at eleven o'clock.

"Nu, Mr. Gembitz," he asked, rousing himself with an effort, "have you heard from your daughter?"

"No, I ain't," Gembitz said, "and from the looks of you, you ain't heard from your son, either."

Danowitz smiled a rather wan smile.

"You ain't no judge of looks, Mr. Gembitz," he said. "The reason why I am looking this way is that I have heard from him--indirectly."

"And how is he getting on?" Gembitz asked.

"He's getting on fine," Danowitz replied. "He's going to marry a Miss McNally."

Gembitz sat down heavily in the revolving chair at Gershon, Jr.'s vacant desk. "_Um Gottes Willen_, you don't tell me!" he said.

He tried to think of something to say that might be of some consolation.

"Well," he said, after a long silence, "the chances is that you don't feel no worse over your son marrying Miss McNally than Miss McNally's father does about her marrying your son."

"Did I say any different?" Danowitz asked. "And the chances is she is a very nice girl, too," Gembitz added.

"Yaw, a nice girl!" Danowitz exclaimed. "She's an actress."

Gembitz grew red in the face.