Mr Riesbitter lit a cigar, and looked at us solemnly over his zareba of chins.
‘Now, let me tell ya something,’ he said to Gussie. ‘You lizzun t’ me.’
Gussie registered respectful attention. Mr Riesbitter mused for a moment and shelled the cuspidor with indirect fire over the edge of the desk.
‘Lizzun t’ me,’ he said again. ‘I seen you rehearse, as I promised Miss Denison I would. You ain’t bad for an amateur. You gotta lot to learn, but it’s in you. What it comes to is that I can fix you up in the four-a-day, if you’ll take thirty-five per. I can’t do better than that, and I wouldn’t have done that if the little lady hadn’t of kep’ after me. Take it or leave it. What do you say?’
‘I’ll take it,’ said Gussie, huskily. ‘Thank you.’
In the passage outside, Gussie gurgled with joy and slapped me on the back. ‘Bertie, old man, it’s all right. I’m the happiest man in New York.’
‘Now what?’
‘Well, you see, as I was telling you when Abe came in, Ray’s father used to be in the profession. He was before our time, but I remember hearing about him – Joe Danby. He used to be well known in London before he came over to America. Well, he’s a fine old boy, but as obstinate as a mule, and he didn’t like the idea of Ray marrying me because I wasn’t in the profession. Wouldn’t hear of it. Well, you remember at Oxford I could always sing a song pretty well; so Ray got hold of old Riesbitter and made him promise to come and hear me rehearse and get me bookings if he liked my work. She stands high with him. She coached me for weeks, the darling. And now, as you heard him say, he’s booked me in the small time a thirty-five dollars a week.’
I steadied myself against the wall. The effects of the restoratives supplied by my pal at the hotel bar were beginning to work off, and I felt a little weak. Through a sort of mist I seemed to have a vision of Aunt Agatha hearing that the head of the Mannering-Phippses was about to appear on the vaudeville stage. Aunt Agatha’s worship of the family name amounts to an obsession. The Mannering-Phippses were an old-established clan when William the Conqueror was a small boy going round with bare legs and a catapult. For centuries they have called kings by their first names and helped dukes with their weekly rent; and there’s practically nothing a Mannering-Phipps can do that doesn’t blot his escutcheon. So what Aunt Agatha would say – beyond saying that it was all my fault – when she learned the horrid news, it was beyond me to imagine.
‘Come back to the hotel, Gussie,’ I said. ‘There’s a sportsman there who mixes things he calls “lightning whizzers”. Something tells me I need one now. And excuse me for one minute, Gussie, I want to send a cable.’
It was clear to me by now that Aunt Agatha had picked the wrong man for this job of disentangling Gussie from the clutches of the American vaudeville profession. What I needed was reinforcements. For a moment I thought of cabling Aunt Agatha to come over, but reason told me that this would be overdoing it. I wanted assistance, but not so badly as that. I hit what seemed to me the happy mean. I cabled to Gussie’s mother and made it urgent.
‘What were you cabling about?’ asked Gussie, later.
‘Oh, just to say I had arrived safely, and all that sort of tosh,’ I answered.
Gussie opened his vaudeville career on the following Monday at a rummy sort of place uptown where they had moving pictures some of the time and, in between, one or two vaudeville acts. It had taken a lot of careful handling to bring him up to scratch. He seemed to take my sympathy and assistance for granted, and I couldn’t let him down. My only hope, which grew as I listened to him rehearsing, was that he would be such a frightful frost at his first appearance that he would never dare to perform again; and, as that would automatically squash the marriage, it seemed best to me to let the thing go on.
He wasn’t taking any chances. On the Saturday and Sunday we practically lived in a beastly little music-room at the offices of the publishers whose songs he proposed to use. A little chappie with a hooked nose sucked a cigarette and played the piano all day. Nothing could tire that lad. He seemed to take a personal interest in the thing.
Gussie would clear his throat and begin:
‘There’s a great big choo-choo waiting at the deepo.’
THE CHAPPIE (playing chords): ‘Is that so? What’s it waiting for?’
GUSSIE (rather rattled at the interruption): ‘Waiting for me.’
THE CHAPPIE (surprised): ‘For you?’
GUSSIE (sticking to it): ‘Waiting for me—e—ee!’
THE CHAPPIE (sceptically): ‘You don’t say!’
GUSSIE: ‘For I’m off to Tennessee.’
THE CHAPPIE (conceding a point): ‘Now, I live at Yonkers.’
He did this all through the song. At first poor old Gussie asked him to stop, but the chappie said, No, it was always done. It helped to get pep into the thing. He appealed to me whether the thing didn’t want a bit of pep, and I said it wanted all the pep it could get. And the chappie said to Gussie, ‘There you are!’ So Gussie had to stand it.
The other song that he intended to sing was one of those moon songs. He told me in a hushed voice that he was using it because it was one of the songs that the girl Ray sang when lifting them out of their seats at Mosenstein’s and elsewhere. The fact seemed to give it sacred associations for him.
You will scarcely believe me, but the management expected Gussie to show up and start performing at one o’clock in the afternoon. I told him they couldn’t be serious, as they must know that he would be rolling out for a bit of lunch at that hour, but Gussie said this was the usual thing in the four-a-day, and he didn’t suppose he would ever get any lunch again until he landed on the big time. I was just condoling with him, when I found that he was taking it for granted that I should be there at one o’clock, too. My idea had been that I should look in at night, when – if he survived – he would be coming up for the fourth time; but I’ve never deserted a pal in distress, so I said goodbye to the little lunch I’d been planning at a rather decent tavern I’d discovered on Fifth Avenue, and trailed along. They were showing pictures when I reached my seat. It was one of those Western films, where the cowboy jumps on his horse and rides across country at a hundred and fifty miles an hour to escape the sheriff, not knowing, poor chump! that he might just as well stay where he is, the sheriff having a horse of his own which can do three hundred miles an hour without coughing. I was just going to close my eyes and try to forget till they put Gussie’s name up when I discovered that I was sitting next to a deucedly pretty girl.
No, let me be honest. When I went in I had seen that there was a deucedly pretty girl sitting in that particular seat, so I had taken the next one. What happened now was that I began, as it were, to drink her in. I wished they would turn the lights up so that I could see her better. She was rather small, with great big eyes and a ripping smile. It was a shame to let all that run to seed, so to speak, in semi-darkness.
Suddenly the lights did go up, and the orchestra began to play a tune which, though I haven’t much of an ear for music, seemed somehow familiar. The next instant out pranced old Gussie from the wings in a purple frock-coat and a brown top-hat, grinned feebly at the audience, tripped over his feet, blushed, and began to sing the Tennessee song.
It was rotten. The poor nut had got stage fright so badly that it practically eliminated his voice. He sounded like some far-off echo of the past ‘yodelling’ through a woollen blanket.
For the first time since I heard that he was about to go into vaudeville I felt a faint hope creeping over me. I was sorry for the wretched chap, of course, but there was no denying that the thing had its bright side. No management on earth would go on paying thirty-five dollars a week for this sort of performance. This was going to be Gussie’s first and only. He would have to leave the profession. The old boy would say, ‘Unhand my daughter’. And, with decent luck, I saw myself leading Gussie on to the next English-bound liner and handing him over intact to Aunt Agatha.
He got th
rough the song somehow and limped off amidst roars of silence from the audience. There was a brief respite, then out he came again.
He sang this time as if nobody loved him. As a song, it was not a very pathetic song, being all about coons spooning in June under the moon, and so on and so forth, but Gussie handled it in such a sad, crushed way that there was genuine anguish in every line. By the time he reached the refrain I was nearly in tears. It seemed such a rotten sort of world with all that kind of thing going on in it.
He started the refrain, and then the most frightful thing happened. The girl next to me got up in her seat, chucked her head back, and began to sing too. I say ‘too’, but it wasn’t really too, because her first note stopped Gussie dead, as if he had been pole-axed.
I never felt so bally conspicuous in my life. I huddled down in my seat and wished I could turn my collar up. Everybody seemed to be looking at me.
In the midst of my agony I caught sight of Gussie. A complete change had taken place in the old lad. He was looking most frightfully bucked. I must say the girl was singing most awfully well, and it seemed to act on Gussie like a tonic. When she came to the end of the refrain, he took it up, and they sang together, and the end of it was that he went off the popular hero. The audience yelled for more, and were only quieted when they turned down the lights and put on a film.
When I recovered I tottered round to see Gussie. I found him sitting on a box behind the stage, looking like one who had seen visions.
‘Isn’t she a wonder, Bertie?’ he said, devoutly. ‘I hadn’t a notion she was going to be there. She’s playing at the Auditorium this week, and she can only just have had time to get back to her matinée. She risked being late, just to come and see me through. She’s my good angel, Bertie. She saved me. If she hadn’t helped me out I don’t know what would have happened. I was so nervous I didn’t know what I was doing. Now that I’ve got through the first show I shall be all right.’
I was glad I had sent that cable to his mother. I was going to need her. The thing had got beyond me.
During the next week I saw a lot of old Gussie, and was introduced to the girl. I also met her father, a formidable old boy with thick eyebrows and a sort of determined expression. On the following Wednesday Aunt Julia arrived. Mrs Mannering-Phipps, my Aunt Julia, is, I think, the most dignified person I know. She lacks Aunt Agatha’s punch, but in a quiet way she has always contrived to make me feel, from boyhood up, that I was a poor worm. Not that she harries me like Aunt Agatha. The difference between the two is, that Aunt Agatha conveys the impression that she considers me personally responsible for all the sin and sorrow in the world, while Aunt Julia’s manner seems to suggest that I am more to be pitied then censured.
If it wasn’t that the thing was a matter of historical fact, I should be inclined to believe that Aunt Julia had never been on the vaudeville stage. She is like a stage duchess.
She always seems to me to be in a perpetual state of being about to desire the butler to instruct the head footman to serve lunch in the blue-room overlooking the west terrace. She exudes dignity. Yet, twenty-five years ago, so I’ve been told by old boys who were lads about town in those days, she was knocking them cold at the Tivoli in a double act called ‘Fun in a Tea-Shop’, in which she wore tights and sang a song with a chorus that began ‘Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay’.
There are some things a chappie’s mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing ‘Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay’ is one of them.
She got straight to the point within five minutes of our meeting.
‘What is this, about Gussie? Why did you cable for me, Bertie?’
‘It’s rather a long story,’ I said, ‘and complicated. If you don’t mind, I’ll let you have it in a series of motion pictures. Suppose we look in at the Auditorium for a few minutes.’
The girl, Ray, had been re-engaged for a second week at the Auditorium, owing to the big success of her first week. Her act consisted of three songs. She did herself well in the matter of costume and scenery. She had a ripping voice. She looked most awfully pretty; and altogether the act was, broadly speaking, a pippin.
Aunt Julia didn’t speak till we were in our seats. Then she gave a sort of sigh.
‘It’s twenty-five years since I was in a music-hall!’
She didn’t say any more, but sat there with her eyes glued on the stage.
After about half an hour the johnnies who work the card-index system at the side of the stage put up the name of Ray Denison, and there was a good deal of applause.
‘Watch this act, Aunt Julia,’ I said.
She didn’t seem to hear me.
‘Twenty-five years! What did you say, Bertie?’
‘Watch this act and tell me what you think of it.’
‘Who is it? Ray. Oh!’
‘Exhibit A,’ I said. ‘The girl Gussie’s engaged to.’
The girl did her act, and the house rose at her. They didn’t want to let her go. She had to come back again and again. When she had finally disappeared I turned to Aunt Julia.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘I like her work. She’s an artist.’
‘We will now, if you don’t mind, step a goodish way uptown.’
And we took the subway to where Gussie, the human film, was earning his thirty-five per. As luck would have it, we hadn’t been in the place ten minutes when out he came.
‘Exhibit B,’ I said. ‘Gussie.’
I don’t quite know what I had expected her to do, but I certainly didn’t expect her to sit there without a word. She did not move a muscle, but just stared at Gussie as he drooled on about the moon. I was sorry for the woman, for it must have been a shock to her to see her only son in a mauve frock-coat and a brown top-hat, but I thought it best to let her get a strangle-hold on the intricacies of the situation as quickly as possible. If I had tried to explain the affair without the aid of illustrations I should have talked all day and left her muddled up as to who was going to marry whom, and why.
I was astonished at the improvement in dear old Gussie. He had got back his voice and was putting the stuff over well. It reminded me of the night at Oxford when, then but a lad of eighteen, he sang ‘Let’s All Go Down The Strand’ after a bump supper, standing the while up to his knees in the college fountain. He was putting just the same zip into things now.
When he had gone off Aunt Julia sat perfectly still for a long time, and then she turned to me. Her eyes shone queerly.
‘What does this mean, Bertie?’
She spoke quite quietly, but her voice shook a bit.
‘Gussie went into the business,’ I said, ‘because the girl’s father wouldn’t let him marry her unless he did. If you feel up to it perhaps you wouldn’t mind tottering round to One Hundred and Thirty-third Street and having a chat with him. He’s an old boy with eyebrows, and he’s Exhibit C on my list. When I’ve put you in touch with him I rather fancy my share of the business is concluded, and it’s up to you.’
The Danbys lived in one of those big apartments uptown which look as if they cost the earth and really cost about half as much as a hall-room down in the forties. We were shown into the sitting-room, and presently old Danby came in.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Danby,’ I began.
I had got as far as that when there was a kind of gasping cry at my elbow.
‘Joe!’ cried Aunt Julia, and staggered against the sofa.
For a moment old Danby stared at her, and then his mouth fell open and his eyebrows shot up like rockets.
‘Julie!’
And then they had got hold of each other’s hands and were shaking them till I wondered their arms didn’t come unscrewed.
I’m not equal to this sort of thing at such short notice. The change in Aunt Julia made me feel quite dizzy. She had shed her grande-dame manner completely, and was blushing and smiling. I don’t like to say such things of any aunt of mine, or I would go further and put it on record that she was giggling. And old Danby, who usually
looked like a cross between a Roman emperor and Napoleon Bonaparte in a bad temper, was behaving like a small boy.
‘Joe!’
‘Julie!’
‘Dear old Joe! Fancy meeting you again!’
‘Wherever have you come from, Julie?’
Well, I didn’t know what it was all about, but I felt a bit out of it. I butted in:
‘Aunt Julia wants to have a talk with you, Mr Danby.’
‘I knew you in a second, Joe!’
‘It’s twenty-five years since I saw you, kid, and you don’t look a day older.’
‘Oh, Joe! I’m an old woman!’
‘What are you doing over here? I suppose’ – old Danby’s cheerfulness waned a trifle – ‘I suppose your husband is with you?’
‘My husband died a long, long while ago, Joe.’
Old Danby shook his head.
‘You never ought to have married out of the profession, Julie. I’m not saying a word against the late – I can’t remember his name; never could – but you shouldn’t have done it, an artist like you. Shall I ever forget the way you used to knock them with “Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay”?’
‘Ah! how wonderful you were in that act, Joe.’ Aunt Julia sighed. ‘Do you remember the back-fall you used to do down the steps? I always have said that you did the best back-fall in the profession.’
‘I couldn’t do it now!’
‘Do you remember how we put it across at the Canterbury, Joe? Think of it! The Canterbury’s a moving-picture house now, and the old Mogul runs French revues.’
‘I’m glad I’m not there to see them.’
‘Joe, tell me, why did you leave England?’
‘Well, I … I wanted a change. No, I’ll tell you the truth, kid. I wanted you, Julie. You went off and married that – whatever that stage-door johnny’s name was – and it broke me all up.’
Aunt Julia was staring at him. She is what they call a well-preserved woman. It’s easy to see that, twenty-five years ago, she must have been something quite extraordinary to look at. Even now she’s almost beautiful. She has very large brown eyes, a mass of soft grey hair, and the complexion of a girl of seventeen.