Local Color Part 15

"Yes, my dear, I will--I mean, I won't."

"Besides, you may be needed any minute now. Mr. Harcourt"--she indicated that gentleman, who had approached--"has been kind enough to invite us to take part in this beautiful production."

"But, my dear--but----"

"Chester, I wish for my sake you would refrain from keeping on saying 'but.' And please quit interrupting."

"You see--it's like this," explained Mr. Harcourt: "It's the scene at the dock when the heroine gets home. You two are to be two of the pa.s.sengers--the director says he'll be very glad to have you take part.

I just spoke to him. There will be many others in the scene--extras, you know. Think you'd like it? It will be an experience."

"As you say, Mr. Harcourt, it will be an experience," said Mrs. Pilkins.

"I accept with pleasure. So does my husband."

Promptly ensued then action, and plenty of it. With many others, recruited from the ranks of the populace, the Chester Pilkinses were herded into a corner of the open-faced stage at the back side of the bazaar--a corner which the two presiding genii of that domain, known technically and respectively as the boss carpenter and the head property man, had, by virtue of their magic and in accordance with an order from their overlord, the director, transformed, even as one waited, from something else into the pierhead of a New York dock. With these same others our two friends mounted a steep flight of steps behind the scenes, and then, shoving sheeplike through a painted gangway, in a painted bulkhead of a painted ship, they flocked down across a canvas-sided gangplank to the ostensible deck of the presumable pier, defiling off from left to right out of lens range, the while they smiled and waved fond greetings to supposit.i.tious friends.

When they had been made to do this twice and thrice, when divers stumbling individuals among them had been corrected of a desire to gaze, with the rapt, fascinated stare of sleep-walkers, straight into the eye of the machine, when the director was satisfied with his rehearsal, he suddenly yelled "Camera!" and started them at it all over again.

In this instant a spell laid hold on Chester Pilkins. As one exalted he went through the picture, doing his share and more than his share to make it what a picture should be. For being suddenly possessed with the instinct to act--an instinct which belongs to all of us, but which some of us after we have grown up manage to repress--Chester acted. In his movements there was the unstudied carelessness which is best done when it is studied; in his fashion of carrying his furled umbrella and his strapped steamer rug--the Ziegler Company had furnished the steamer rug but the umbrella was his own--there was natural grace; in his quick start of recognition on beholding some dear one in the imaginary throng waiting down on the pier out of sight there was that art which is the highest of all arts.

With your permission we shall skip the orange groves, languishing through that day for Mr. and Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins to come and see them. We shall skip the San Francisco Exposition. We shall skip the Yosemite Valley, in which to Chester there seemed to be something lacking, and the Big Trees, which after all were much like other trees, excepting these were larger. These things the travellers saw within the scope of three weeks, and the end of those three weeks and the half of a fourth week brings them and us back to 373 j.a.ponica Avenue. There daily Chester watched the amus.e.m.e.nt columns of the _Eagle_.

On a Monday evening at seven-fifteen he arrived home from the office, holding in his hand a folded copy of that dependable sheet.

"Chester," austerely said Mrs. Pilkins as he let himself in at the door, "you are late, and you have kept everything waiting. Hurry through your dinner. We are going over to the Lewinsohns for four-handed rummy and then a rarebit."

"Not to-night, Gertrude Maud," said Chester.

"And why not to-night?" demanded the lady with a rising inflection.

"Because," said Chester, "to-night we are going to the Bijou Palace Theatre. The Prince of the Desert goes on to-night for the first run."

"Oh," said Mrs. Pilkins understandingly. "I'll telephone Mrs. Lewinsohn we can't come--make some excuse or other. Yes, we'll go to the Bijou Palace." She said this as though the idea had been hers all along.

Seated in the darkened auditorium they watched the play unfold upon the screen. They watched while the hero, a n.o.ble son of the Arabic sands, rescued the heroine, who was daughter to a comedy missionary, from the clutches of the wicked governor-general. They saw the barefoot Armenian maids dragged by mocking nomads across burning wastes to the tented den of a villainous sheik, and in the pinioned procession Chester recognised the damsel of the truant curl and the ticklish nose. They saw the intrepid and imperturbable American correspondent as, unafraid, he stood in the midst of carnage and slaughter, making notes in a large leather-backed notebook such as all newspaper correspondents are known to carry. But on these stirring episodes Chester K. Pilkins looked with but half an eye and less than half his mind. He was waiting for something else.

Eventually, at the end of Reel Four, his waiting was rewarded, and he achieved the ambition which all men bear within themselves, but which only a few, comparatively speaking, ever gratify--the yearning to see ourselves as others see us. While the blood drummed in his heated temples Chester Pilkins saw himself, and he liked himself. I do not overstretch the truth when I say that he liked himself first-rate. And when, in the very midst of liking himself, he reflected that elsewhere over the land, in scores, perhaps in hundreds of places such as this one, favoured thousands were seeing him too--well, the thought was well-nigh overpowering.

For the succeeding three nights Mr. Pilkins' fireside knew him not. The figure of speech here employed is purely poetic, because, as a matter of fact, the house was heated by steam. But upon each of these three evenings he sat in the Bijou Palace, waiting for that big moment to come when he before his own eyes should appear. Each night he discovered new and pleasing details about himself--the set of his head upon his shoulders, the swing of his arm, the lift of his leg; each night, the performance being ended, he came forth regarding his fellow patrons compa.s.sionately, for they were but the poor creatures who had made up the audience, while he veritably had been not only part of the audience but part of the entertainment as well; each night he expected to be recognised in the flesh by some emerging person of a keen discernment of vision, but was disappointed here; and each night he went home at ten-forty-five and told Gertrude Maud that business on the other side of the bridge had detained him. She believed him. She--poor, blinded wretch--did not see in his eyes the flickering reflection of the spark of desire, now fanning into a flame of resolution within the brazier of his ribs.

Thursday night came, and The Prince of the Desert film concluded its engagement at the Bijou Palace. Friday night came, but Chester K.

Pilkins did not. He did not come home that night nor the next day nor the next night. Without warning to any one he had vanished utterly, leaving behind no word of whatsoever nature. He was gone, entirely and completely gone, taking with him only the garments in which he stood--a black cutaway, black four-in-hand tie, black derby hat, plain b.u.t.ton shoes, plain, white, stiff-bosomed shirt. I am quoting now from the description embodied in a printed general alarm sent out by the police department, which general alarm went so far as to mention considerable bridge-work in the upper jaw and a pair of fairly prominent ears.

At last Chester K. Pilkins, although not present to read what was printed of him, got into the papers. Being questioned by reporters, his late employers declared that the missing man was of unimpeachable habits and that his accounts were straight, and immediately then, in a panic, set experts at work on his books. Remarkable to state, his accounts were straight. In the bank, in his wife's name, he had left a comfortable balance of savings. His small investments were in order. They likewise were found to be in his wife's name; it seemed he had sent a written order for their transfer on the eve of his flight--if flight it was. The house already was hers by virtue of a deed executed years before.

Discussing the nine-day sensation, the ladies of the neighbourhood said that even if Chester Pilkins had run away with some brazen hussy or other, as to them seemed most probable--because, you know, you never can tell about these little quiet men--at least he had left poor, dear Gertrude well provided for, and that, of course, was something.

Something this may have been; but the deserted wife mourned and was desolate. She wanted Chester back; she was used to having him round. He had been a good husband, as husbands go--not exciting, perhaps, but good. Despite strong evidences to the contrary, she could not bring herself to believe that deliberately he had abandoned her. He was dead, by some tragic and violent means, or else he had been kidnapped. Twice with a sinking heart she accompanied a detective sergeant from borough headquarters to the morgue, there to gaze upon a poor relic of mortality which had been fished out of the river, but which bore no resemblance to her Chester nor, indeed, to anything else that once had been human.

After this the police lost even a perfunctory interest in the quest. But the lady was not done. She paid a retainer to a private detective agency having branches over the country, and search was maintained in many places, high and low.

Three months went by; then a fourth. j.a.ponica Avenue may have forgotten Chester Pilkins, but Gertrude Maud had not. At the tag end of the fourth month came tidings from the main office of the detective agency which, overnight, started Mrs. Pilkins to where--as the pa.s.senger agents for the transcontinental lines so aptly phrased it--California's Golden Strand is kissed by the pellucid waves of the Sun-Down Sea. It couldn't be true, this report which had been brought to her by a representative of the great sleuth for whom the agency was named; indeed, it was inconceivable to one who knew her husband that such a report could be true, but she would make certain for herself. She would--so this suffering, conscientious woman told herself--leave no stone unturned.

She would neglect to follow up no clue merely because of its manifest improbability.

So back she journeyed to that selfsame town where the Ziegler studios were housed. A local representative of the agency, being advised by telegraph in advance of her coming, met her at the station. Expressing physically the gentle sympathy of an honorary pallbearer, he led her to an automobile, and with her he drove for miles through streets which she remembered having traversed at least once before, until in the far suburban reaches of the city, where the blue foothills of the coast range came down toward the sea, he brought her to a centre of the moving-picture industry; not the Ziegler establishment this time, but to the curious place known as Filmville--ninety fenced-in acres of seeming madness. It was getting on toward five o'clock in the afternoon when the automobile halted before its minareted portals. Leaving Mrs. Pilkins in the car her companion went to confer briefly with a uniformed individual on duty at the door. Returning to her he spoke as follows:

"The--ahem--the party we've got under suspicion is out on location with a company. But they're due back here before dark. I guess we'd better wait a spell."

He helped her to alight, dismissed the automobile, and accompanied her to an ornamental seat facing an exceedingly ornamental fountain which spouted in a gra.s.s plot hard by the gates to Filmville. As she sat and waited, strangely clad men and women--purporting to represent in their attire many periods of the world's history and many remote corners of the world's surface--pa.s.sed by, going in and out. From over the high walls came to her jungle sounds and jungle smells, for this large concern maintained its own zoo upon its own premises. Persistently a sacred cow of India, tethered in a recess of the fence where herbage sprouted, mooed for an absent mate. The voice of the creature matched Mrs. Pilkins' thoughts. Internally she was mooing for her mate too.

Twilight impended when two automobile loads of princ.i.p.als, attired cowboyishly and cowgirlishly, came thumping out of the north along the dusty road. These persons dismounted and trooped inside. A little behind them, heralded by a jingle of accoutrement, came a dozen or so punchers riding ponies. With jest and quip bandied back and forth, and to the tinkling of their spurs, these last dropped off their jaded mounts, leaving the ponies to stand with drooping heads and dragging bridles, and went clumping on their high heels into a small wooden place, advertising liquid refreshment, which stood across the way. The detective softly joggled Mrs. Pilkins' elbow.

"Come on, ma'am," he said; "just follow me. And don't say anything until you're sure. And don't scream or faint or anything like that--if you can help it."

"I shan't," said Mrs. Pilkins, all a-tremble. She was resolved not to scream and she was not the fainting kind.

Very naturally and very properly, as a gently nurtured woman, Mrs.

Pilkins had never seen the interior of a barroom. From just inside the swinging doors where her escort halted her she looked about the place with the eye of curiosity, and even though her mind swirled tumultuously she comprehended it--the gla.s.sware, the pictures on the walls, the short bar, the affable dispenser who stood behind it, and the row of cowboys who lined the front of it from end to end, with their backs and hunched shoulders all turned to her, stretching away in a diminishing perspective.

"Wait a minute, lady," advised the detective in a whisper. "Take your time and look 'em over careful. And be sure--be sure to be sure."

The lady strove to obey. She looked and she looked. At the back of the room three punchers were clumped together, withdrawn slightly from their fellows--a tall puncher, a medium-sized puncher, and between these two a small puncher.

"Here, ol'-timer," bade the tall puncher, drumming with his knuckles upon the bar, "wait on fellers that a-got a real thirst. Three long beers!"

The beers were drawn and placed at properly s.p.a.ced intervals before the three. Their three right elbows rose at an angle; three flagons of creamy brew vanished.

A fourth cowboy slid down toward them.

"Well," he demanded boisterously, "how's Little Chestnut makin' out?

Still saddle sore? Still hatin' to think of the place where you got to meet that there old paint pony of yourn to-mor' mornin'?"

It was the tall cowboy who made answer.

"Nix on that Chestnut thing," he said. "That's old stuff. You should a-seen the little man stay by that pinto of hisn when she got uptious a while ago--jist stay by her and pour the leather into her. No, sir, that there Chestnut stuff don't go any more for this bunch. This here"--and his long flannel-clad arm was endearingly enwrapped about the shoulders of his small companion--"this here boy from now on is Old Chesty."

Even though viewed from behind, it might be seen that the person thus rechristened was protruding a proud chest. With a little swagger he breasted the bar.

"I'm buying," he stated loudly. "Everybody's in on this one."

"Whee!" yelled the big cowboy. "Chesty's buyin'--this one's on Old Chesty."

But another voice rose above his voice, over-topping it--the cry of an agonised woman:

"Oh, Chester!"

As though he had been bee-stung the little man pivoted on his heels. His chaps hung floppingly about his short legs; his blue shirt was open halfway down his sunburnt chest; his pistol holster flapped against his flank; his wide white hat was upon the back of his head; his neck was tanned brown; his face was red and sweaty; his large outstanding ears were burnt a bright, translucent crimson; his hands were dirty--but it was Chester. For one moment, contemplating the accusing, br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes of the lady, he flinched and shrank as one reared amid the refining influences of j.a.ponica Avenue under such circ.u.mstances as these might well have flinched, might well have shrunk. Then he stiffened and in all visible regards was again Old Chesty, the roughrider.

"h.e.l.lo, Gertrude," he said, just like that.