I am the richer by the acquaintance of four newspaper men. Singly, they are my encyclopedias, friends, mentors, and sometimes bankers.
But now and then it happens that all of them will pitch upon the same printworthy incident of the pa.s.sing earthly panorama and will send in reportorial constructions thereof to their respective journals. It is then that, for me, it is to laugh. For it seems that to each of them, trained and skilled as he may be, the same occurrence presents a different facet of the cut diamond, life.
One will have it (let us say) that Mme. Andre Macarte"s apartment was looted by six burglars, who descended via the fire-escape and bore away a ruby tiara valued at two thousand dollars and a five-hundred-dollar prize Spitz dog, which (in violation of the expectoration ordinance) was making free with the halls of the Wuttapesituckquesunoowetunquah Apartments.
My second "chiel" will take notes to the effect that while a friendly game of pinochle was in progress in the tenement rooms of Mrs. Andy McCarty, a lady guest named Ruby O"Hara threw a burglar down six flights of stairs, where he was pinioned and held by a two-thousand-dollar English bulldog amid a crowd of five hundred excited spectators.
My third chronicler and friend will gather the news threads of the happening in his own happy way; setting forth on the page for you to read that the house of Antonio Macartini was blown up at 6 A. M., by the Black Hand Society, on his refusing to leave two thousand dollars at a certain street corner, killing a pet five-hundred-dollar Pomeranian belonging to Alderman Rubitara"s little daughter (see photo and diagram opposite).
Number four of my history-makers will simply construe from the premises the story that while an audience of two thousand enthusiasts was listening to a Rubinstein concert on Sixth Street, a woman who said she was Mrs. Andrew M. Carter threw a brick through a plate-gla.s.s window valued at five hundred dollars. The Carter woman claimed that some one in the building had stolen her dog.
Now, the discrepancies in these registrations of the day"s doings need do no one hurt. Surely, one newspaper is enough for any man to prop against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his wife"s glance. If he be foolish enough to read four he is no wiser than a Higher Critic.
I remember (probably as well as you do) having read the parable of the talents. A prominent citizen, about to journey into a far country, first hands over to his servants his goods. To one he gives five talents; to another two; to another one--to every man according to his several ability, as the text has it. There are two versions of this parable, as you well know. There may be more--I do not know.
When the p. c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put their talents out at usury and gained one hundred per cent. Good. The unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks, surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned was composed of 750 ounces of silver--about $900 worth. So the chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used in those davs. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word "pound" instead of "talent."
A pound of silver may very well be laid away--and carried away--in a napkin, as any hotel or restaurant man will tell you.
But let us get away from our mutton.
When the returned n.o.bleman finds that the one-talented servant has nothing to hand over except the original fund entrusted to him, he is as angry as a multi-millionaire would be if some one should hide under his bed and make a noise like an a.s.sessment. He orders the unprofitable servant cast into outer darkness, after first taking away his talent and giving it to the one-hundred-per cent. financier, and breathing strange saws, saying: "From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Which is the same as to say: "Nothing from nothing leaves nothing."
And now closer draw the threads of parable, precept allegory, and narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors trip on.
Talent: A gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the parable in Matt. XXV. 14-30.)
In New York City to-day there are (estimated) 125,000 living creatures training for the stage. This does not include seals, pigs, dogs, elephants, prize-fighters, Carmens, mind-readers, or j.a.panese wrestlers.
The bulk of them are in the ranks of the Four Million. Out of this number will survive a thousand.
Nine hundred of these will have attained their fulness of fame when they shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure in a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud commentary: "That"s me."
Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis XIV court costumes, shall welcome the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words, turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.
Ten, in tiny lace caps, shall dust Ibsen furniture for six minutes after the rising of the curtain.
Nine shall attain the circuits, besieging with muscle, skill, eye, hand, voice, wit, brain, heel and toe the ultimate high walls of stardom.
One shall inherit Broadway. Sic venit gloria mundi.
Cliff McGowan and Mac McGowan were cousins. They lived on the West Side and were talented. Singing, dancing, imitations, trick bicycle riding, boxing, German and Irish dialect comedy, and a little sleight-of-hand and balancing of wheat straws and wheelbarrows on the ends of their chins came as easy to them as it is for you to fix your rat so it won"t show or to dodge a creditor through the swinging-doors of a well-lighted cafe--according as you may belong to the one or the other division of the greatest prestidigitators--the people. They were slim, pale, consummately self-possessed youths, whose fingernails were always irreproachably (and clothes seams reproachfully) shiny. Their conversation was in sentences so short that they made Kipling"s seem as long as court citations.
Having the temperament, they did no work. Any afternoon you could find them on Eighth Avenue either in front of Spinelli"s barber shop, Mike Dugan"s place, or the Limerick Hotel, rubbing their forefinger nails with dingy silk handkerchiefs. At any time, if you had happened to be standing, undecisive, near a pool-table, and Cliff and Mac had, casually, as it were, drawn near, mentioning something disinterestedly, about a game, well, indeed, would it have been for you had you gone your way, unresponsive. Which a.s.sertion, carefully considered, is a study in tense, punctuation, and advice to strangers.
Of all kinships it is likely that the closest is that of cousin. Between cousins there exist the ties of race, name, and favor--ties thicker than water, and yet not coagulated with the jealous precipitations of brotherhood or the enjoining obligations of the matrimonial yoke. You can bestow upon a cousin almost the interest and affection that you would give to a stranger; you need not feel toward him the contempt and embarra.s.sment that you have for one of your father"s sons--it is the closer clan-feeling that sometimes makes the branch of a tree stronger than its trunk.
Thus were the two McGowans bonded. They enjoyed a quiet celebrity in their district, which was a strip west of Eighth Avenue with the Pump for its pivot. Their talents were praised in a hundred "joints"; their friendship was famed even in a neighborhood where men had been known to fight off the wives of their friends--when domestic onslaught was being made upon their friends by the wives of their friends. (Thus do the limitations of English force us to repetends.)
So, side by side, grim, sallow, lowering, inseparable, undefeated, the cousins fought their way into the temple of Art--art with a big A, which causes to intervene a lesson in geometry.
One night at about eleven o"clock Del Delano dropped into Mike"s place on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the cafe became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or Mr. Shaw, of England, had accepted an invitation to read selections from "Rena, the Snow-bird"
at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O"Connor at Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the place.
Del Delano could not make his feet behave; and so the world paid him $300 a week to see them misconduct themselves on the vaudeville stage.
To make the matter plain to you (and to swell the number of words), he was the best fancy dancer on any of the circuits between Ottawa and Corpus Christi. With his eyes fixed on vacancy and his feet apparently fixed on nothing, he "nightly charmed thousands," as his press-agent incorrectly stated. Even taking night performance and matinee together, he scarcely could have charmed more than eighteen hundred, including those who left after Zora, the Nautch girl, had squeezed herself through a hoop twelve inches in diameter, and those who were waiting for the moving pictures.
But Del Delano was the West Side"s favorite; and nowhere is there a more loyal Side. Five years before our story was submitted to the editors, Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue bas.e.m.e.nt like a lean rat and had bitten his way into the Big Cheese. Patched, half-starved, cuffless, and as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced his way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes on Amateur Night at Creary"s (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue. A bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pick-up among the amateurs. After a snore, a gla.s.s of beer from the handsome waiter, and a temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde in Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a three-weeks" trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit covering the three Washingtons--Heights, Statue, and Square.
By the time this story was read and accepted, Del Delano was drawing his three-hundred dollars a week, which, divided by seven (Sunday acts not in costume being permissible), dispels the delusion entertained by most of us that we have seen better days. You can easily imagine the worshipful agitation of Eighth Avenue whenever Del Delano honored it with a visit after his terpsich.o.r.ean act in a historically great and vilely ventilated Broadway theatre. If the West Side could claim forty-two minutes out of his forty-two weeks" bookings every year, it was an occasion for bonfires and repainting of the Pump. And now you know why Mike"s saloon is a Resort, and no longer a simple Place.
Del Delano entered Mike"s alone. So nearly concealed in a fur-lined overcoat and a derby two sizes too large for him was Prince Lightfoot that you saw of his face only his pale, hatchet-edged features and a pair of unwinking, cold, light blue eyes. Nearly every man lounging at Mike"s bar recognized the renowned product of the West Side. To those who did not, wisdom was conveyed by prodding elbows and growls of one-sided introduction.
Upon Charley, one of the bartenders, both fame and fortune descended simultaneously. He had once been honored by shaking hands with the great Delano at a Seventh Avenue boxing bout. So with lungs of bra.s.s he now cried: "Hallo, Del, old man; what"ll it be?"
Mike, the proprietor, who was cranking the cash register, heard. On the next day he raised Charley"s wages five a week.
Del Delano drank a pony beer, paying for it carelessly out of his nightly earnings of $42.85-5/7. He nodded amiably but coldly at the long line of Mike"s patrons and strolled past them into the rear room of the cafe. For he heard in there sounds pertaining to his own art--the light, stirring staccato of a buck-and-wing dance.
In the back room Mac McGowan was giving a private exhibition of the genius of his feet. A few young men sat at tables looking on critically while they amused themselves seriously with beer. They nodded approval at some new fancy steps of Mac"s own invention.
At the sight of the great Del Delano, the amateur"s feet stuttered, blundered, clicked a few times, and ceased to move. The tongues of one"s shoes become tied in the presence of the Master. Mac"s sallow face took on a slight flush.
From the uncertain cavity between Del Delano"s hat brim and the lapels of his high fur coat collar came a thin puff of cigarette smoke and then a voice:
"Do that last step over again, kid. And don"t hold your arms quite so stiff. Now, then!"
Once more Mac went through his paces. According to the traditions of the man dancer, his entire being was transformed into mere feet and legs.
His gaze and expression became cataleptic; his body, unbending above the waist, but as light as a cork, bobbed like the same cork dancing on the ripples of a running brook. The beat of his heels and toes pleased you like a snare-drum obligato. The performance ended with an amazing clatter of leather against wood that culminated in a sudden flat-footed stamp, leaving the dancer erect and as motionless as a pillar of the colonial portico of a mansion in a Kentucky prohibition town. Mac felt that he had done his best and that Del Delano would turn his back upon him in derisive scorn.
An approximate silence followed, broken only by the mewing of a cafe cat and the hubbub and uproar of a few million citizens and transportation facilities outside.
Mac turned a hopeless but nervy eye upon Del Delano"s face. In it he read disgust, admiration, envy, indifference, approval, disappointment, praise, and contempt.
Thus, in the countenances of those we hate or love we find what we most desire or fear to see. Which is an a.s.sertion equalling in its wisdom and chiaroscuro the most famous sayings of the most foolish philosophers that the world has ever known.
Del Delano retired within his overcoat and hat. In two minutes he emerged and turned his left side to Mac. Then he spoke.
"You"ve got a foot movement, kid, like a baby hippopotamus trying to side-step a jab from a humming-bird. And you hold yourself like a truck driver having his picture taken in a Third Avenue photograph gallery.
And you haven"t got any method or style. And your knees are about as limber as a couple of Yale pa.s.s-keys. And you strike the eye as weighing, let us say, 450 pounds while you work. But, say, would you mind giving me your name?"
"McGowan," said the humbled amateur--"Mac McGowan."
Delano the Great slowly lighted a cigarette and continued, through its smoke:
"In other words, you"re rotten. You can"t dance. But I"ll tell you one thing you"ve got."
"Throw it all off of your system while you"re at it," said Mac. "What"ve I got?"
"Genius," said Del Delano. "Except myself, it"s up to you to be the best fancy dancer in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the colonial possessions of all three."