Local Color Part 14

Awe descended upon the respective souls of his listeners, and there lingered.

"And of course for that--that figure--you play the leading part?" Mrs.

Pilkins put the question almost reverently.

A trace, just a trace, of unconscious bitterness trickled into their tablemate's voice as he answered:

"No, madam, I could hardly go so far as to say that--hardly so far as to say that exactly. My good friend, Mr. Basil Derby, has the t.i.tle role.

He originated the part on Broadway--perhaps that explains it. I play the American newspaper correspondent--a strong part, yet with touches of pure comedy interspersed in it here and there--a part second only to that of the star."

"Does he--this Mr. Derby--does he get anything like what you are paid?"

ventured Mr. Pilkins. Surely the Ziegler Company tempted bankruptcy.

"I suspect so, sir, I suspect so."

Mr. Harcourt's tone indicated subtly that this world was as yet by no means free from injustice.

Before the meal was anywhere near ended--in fact, before they reached the orange sorbet, coming between the roast beef _au jus_ and the choice of young chicken with giblet sauce or cold sliced lamb with pickled beets--the Pilkinses knew a great deal about Mr. Royal Harcourt, and Mr.

Royal Harcourt knew the Pilkinses were good listeners, and not only good listeners but believing ones as well. So a pleasant hour pa.s.sed speedily for all three. There, was an especially pleasant moment just at the close of the dinner when Mr. Harcourt invited them to accompany him at ten o'clock on the following morning to the Ziegler studios, and as his guest to witness the lensing of certain episodes destined to figure in the completed film drama of The Prince of the Desert. Speaking for both, Mrs. Pilkins accepted.

"But, Gertrude Maud," murmured Mr. Pilkins doubtfully as the two of them were leaving the dining-room to hear the orchestra play in the arched inner garden where the poinsettia waved its fiery bannerets aloft, reminding one somewhat of the wagging red oriflamme of a kindred member of the same family--the Irish setter--and the inevitable spoiled childling of every tourist hotel romped to and fro, whining for pure joy, making life a curse for its parents and awakening in the hearts of others reconciling thoughts touching upon the late King Herod, the bald-headed prophet who called the bears down out of the hills, and the style of human sacrifices held to be most agreeable to the tastes of the heathenish G.o.d Moloch. "But, Gertrude Maud," he repeated demurringly as he trailed a pace behind her, seeing she had not heard or seemed not to have heard. In her course Mrs. Pilkins halted so suddenly that a double-stranded necklet of small wooden darning eggs of graduated sizes clinked together smartly.

"Chester," she stated sharply, "don't keep bleating out 'Gertrude Maud'

like that. It annoys me. If you have anything to say, quit mumbling and say it."

"But, Ger--but, my dear," he corrected himself plaintively, "we were going to visit the orange groves to-morrow morning. I have already spoken to the automobile man----"

"Chester," said Mrs. Pilkins, "the orange groves can wait. I understand they have been here for some time. They will probably last for some time longer. To-morrow morning at ten o'clock you and I are going with that nice Mr. Harcourt. It will be an interesting experience and a broadening one. We are here to be broadened. We will see something very worth while, I am convinced of it."

Indeed, they began to witness events of an acutely unusual nature before ten o'clock. As they came out from breakfast there darted down the lobby stairs at the right a young maiden and a youth, both most strikingly garbed. The young lady wore a frock of broad white-and-black stripes clingingly applied to her figure in up-and-down lines. She had a rounded cheek, a floating pigtail, and very large buckles set upon the latchets of her twinkling bootees. The youth was habited as a college boy. At least he wore a Norfolk jacket, a flowing tie of the Windsor, England, and East Aurora, New York, variety, and trousers which were much too short for him if they were meant to be long trousers and much too long for him if they were meant to be short trousers. Hand in hand, with gladsome outcry, this pair sped through the open doors and vaulted down the porch steps without, as nimbly as the chamois of the Alpine steeps, toward a large touring car, wherein sat a waiting chauffeur, most correctly liveried and goggled.

Close behind them, in ardent pursuit, an elderly, rather obese gentleman, in white waistcoat, white side whiskers and white spats--patently a distressed parent--tore into sight, waving his arms and calling upon the fleeing pair to halt. Yet halted they not. They whisked into the rear seat of the automobile just as the elderly gentleman tripped on a crack in the planking of the veranda and was precipitated headlong into the arms of a fat bellboy who at this exact moment emerged from behind a pillar. It was a very fat bellboy--one that could not have weighed an ounce less than two hundred pounds, nor been an hour less than forty years old--and he was grotesquely comical in a suit of bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and green cloth incredibly tight for him.

Locked in each other's arms the parent and bellboy rolled down the steps--b.u.mpety-b.u.mp!--and as progressing thus in close communion they reached the surface of the driveway, a small-town policeman, wearing long chin whiskers and an enormous tin star, ran forward from nowhere in particular, stumbled over their entangled forms and fell upon them with great violence. Then while the three of them squirmed and wriggled there in a heap, the automobile whirled away with the elopers--it was, of course, by now quite plain that they must be elopers--casting mocking, mirthsome glances backward over their diminishing shoulders.

"Slap stick! Rough-house! Cheap stuff! But it goes--somehow it goes. The public stands for it. It pa.s.ses one's comprehension." It was Mr. Royal Harcourt who, standing just behind the Pilkinses, commented in tones of a severe disparagement. They became cognisant also of a man who had been stationed in the gra.s.s plot facing the hotel, grinding away at a crank device attached to a large camera. He had now ceased from grinding.

Except for the camera man, the disapproving Mr. Harcourt and themselves, no one else within sight appeared to take more than a perfunctory interest in what had just occurred.

"Come with me," bade Mr. Harcourt when the outraged parent, the fat bellboy and the small-town policeman had picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and taken themselves away. "You have seen one side of this great industry. I propose now to introduce you to another side of it--the artistic side."

He waved his arm in a general direction, and instantly a small jitneybile detached itself from a flock of jitneybiles stationed alongside the nearer curbing and came curving up to receive them. This city, I may add in pa.s.sing, was the home of the original mother jitney, and there, in her native habitat, she sp.a.w.ned extensively before she moved eastward, breeding busily as she went.

To the enlarged eyes of the Pilkinses strange phases of life were recurringly revealed as the vehicle which their guide had chartered progressed along the wide suburban street, beneath the shelter of the pepper trees and the palms. Yet the residential cla.s.ses living thereabout appeared to view the things which transpired with a languid, not to say a bored, manner; and as for Mr. Harcourt, he, sitting in front alongside the driver, seemed scarcely to notice them at all.

For example: Two automobiles, one loaded with French Zouaves and the other with Prussian infantrymen, all heavily armed and completely accoutred, whizzed by them, going in the opposite direction. A most winsome, heavily bejewelled gypsy la.s.s flirted openly with an affectionate butler beneath the windows of a bungalow, while a waspish housemaid, evidently wrought to a high pitch by emotions of jealousy, balefully spied upon them from the shelter of an adjacent shrubbery clump. Out of a small fruit store emerged a benevolent, white-haired Church of England clergyman, of the last century but one, in ca.s.sock, flat hat and knee breeches. With him walked a most villainous-appearing pirate, a wretch whose whiskered face was gashed with cutla.s.s scars and whose wicked legs were leathered hip-deep in jack boots. These two were eating tangerines from the same paper bag as they issued forth together.

The car bearing our friends pa.s.sed a mansion, the handsomest upon the street. Out from its high-columned portals into the hot sunshine staggered a young man whose lips were very red and whose moustache was very black, with great hollows beneath his eyes and white patches at his temples--a young man dressed in correct evening attire, who, pausing for a moment, struck his open hand to his forehead with a gesture indicative of intense despair--you somehow opined he had lost all at the gaming table--then reeled from sight down a winding driveway. One glimpsed that his glistening linen shirt bosom was of a p.r.o.nounced saffron cast, with collar and tie and cuffs all of the same bilious tone to match.

"Noticed the yellow, didn't you?" asked Mr. Harcourt. "That means he's been doing indoor stuff. Under the lights yellow comes out white."

At the end of a long mile the jitney halted at a gateway set in a high wooden wall beyond which might be seen the peaks of a gla.s.s-topped roof.

About this gateway cl.u.s.tered a large a.s.semblage of citizens of all ages and conditions, but with the young of both s.e.xes predominating. As the young women uniformly wore middy blouses and the young men sport shirts, opened at the neck, there were bared throats and wide sailor collars wherever one looked.

"Extra people," elucidated their host. "They get three a day--when they work. We'll probably use a lot of them to-day."

Within the inclosure a new world unfolded itself for the travellers from the Atlantic seaboard--in fact, sections of several new worlds. At the heels of Mr. Harcourt they threaded their way along a great wooden stage that was open, front and top, to the blue skies, and as they followed after him they looked sideways into the interior of a wrecked and deserted Belgian farmhouse; and next door to that into a courtroom now empty of everything except its furnishings; and next door to that into a gloomy dungeon with barred windows and painted canvas walls. They took a turn across a dusty stretch of earth beyond the far end of the segmented stage, and, lo, they stood in the gibbering midriff of an Oriental city. Behind all was lath, furring and plaster, chicken wire, two-by-fours and shingle nails; but in front 'twas a cross-section of teeming bazaar life. How far away seemed 373 j.a.ponica Avenue, Brooklyn, then!

An energetic man in laced boots and a flannel shirt--Mr. Harcourt called him the director--peered angrily into the perspective of the scene and, waving a pasteboard megaphone in command, ordained that a distant mountain should come ten feet nearer to him. Alongside of this young man Mohammed was an amateur. For the mountain did obey, advancing ten feet, no more and no less. Half a score of young men in cowboy garb enshrouded themselves in flowing white draperies, took long, ta.s.selled spears in their hands, and swung themselves upon the backs of horses--and, behold, a tribe of Bedouins trotted through the crowded, winding way, scattering mendicants, priests, camel drivers and peddlers from before their path.

Upon the edge of all this Chester K. Pilkins hovered as one entranced.

He had lost Mrs. Pilkins; he was separated from Mr. Harcourt.

He became aware of three damsels of tender years who sat in a row upon a pile of rough lumber near at hand. They wore flowing robes of many colours; they were barefooted, their small toes showing pleasantly pink and white below the hems of their robes, and their arms were drawn primly behind them. He watched them. Although manifestly having no part in the scene then being rehea.r.s.ed for filming, they continued to hold their arms in this restrained and presumably uncomfortable att.i.tude, as though they might be practising some new form of a deep-breathing exercise.

As he watched, one of the three, catching his eye, arose and came padding her little bare feet through the dust to where he stood.

"Do me a favour?" she inquired archly.

"Why--why, yes, certainly, if possible," answered Mr. Pilkins.

"Sure, it's possible. See this?" She shook her head, and a wayward ringlet which dangled down against one cheek was agitated to and fro across her pert face. "Well, it's tickling my nose something fierce.

Tuck it back up out of sight, will you?"

"I'm--I'm afraid I don't understand," stammered Mr. Pilkins, jostled internally.

She turned slowly round, and he saw then that her wrists were crossed behind her back and firmly bound together with a length of new cotton rope.

"I'm one of the captive Armenians," she explained, facing him again.

"More'n a hour ago Wagstaff--he's the a.s.sistant director--he tied us up.

We gotta stay all tied up, just so, till our scene goes on. He's such a bug on all them little details--Wagstaff is! Go on--be a good fella and get this hair up out of my face, won't you? I'll be sneezing my head off in another minute. But say--mind the make-up."

A brightish pink in colour, Mr. Pilkins extended a helping hand, tingling inside of himself.

"Chester!"

It was his master's voice, speaking with most decided masterfulness. As though the errant curl had been red-hot Mr. Pilkins jerked his outstretched fingers back. The Armenian maiden retired precipitately, her shoulders twitching.

"Chester, come here!"

Chester came, endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to avoid all outward semblance of guilt.

"Chester, might I ask what you were doing with that--that young person?"

Mrs. Pilkins' manner was ominous.

"I was helping her--a little--with her hair."

"With her--why, what--do you----"

"She is tied. Her hands, you know. ... She----"

"Tied, is she?" Mrs. Pilkins bestowed a chilled stare upon the retreating figure of the captive. "Well, she deserves to be. They should keep her tied. Chester, I want you to stay close to me and not go wandering off again."