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The Unprofitable Servant

Short Stories

"Fox-in-the-Morning"

A Bird of Bagdad

A Blackjack Bargainer

A Call Loan

A Chaparral Christmas Gift

A Chaparral Prince

A Comedy in Rubber

A Cosmopolite in a Cafe

A Departmental Case

A Dinner at--------*

A Double-Dyed Deceiver

A Fog in Santone

A Harlem Tragedy

A Lickpenny Lover

A Little Local Colour

A Little Talk about Mobs

A Madison Square Arabian Night

A Matter of Mean Elevation

A Midsummer Knight's Dream

A Midsummer Masquerade

A Municipal Report

A Newspaper Story

A Night in New Arabia

A Philistine in Bohemia

A Poor Rule

A Ramble in Aphasia

A Retrieved Reformation

A Ruler of Men

A Sacrifice Hit

A Service of Love

A Snapshot at the President

A Strange Story

A Technical Error

A Tempered Wind

According to Their Lights

After Twenty Years

An Adjustment of Nature

An Afternoon Miracle

An Apology

An Unfinished Christmas Story

An Unfinished Story

Aristocracy Versus Hash

Art and the Bronco

At Arms With Morpheus

Babes in the Jungle

Best-Seller

Between Rounds

Bexar Scrip No. 2692

Blind Man's Holiday

Brickdust Row

Buried Treasure

By Courier

Calloway's Code

Caught

Cherchez La Femme

Christmas by Injunction

Compliments of the Season

Confessions of a Humorist

Conscience in Art

Cupid a La Carte

Cupid's Exile Number Two

Dickey

Dougherty's Eye-Opener

Elsie in New York

Extradited from Bohemia

Fickle Fortune or How Gladys Hustled

Friends in San Rosario

From Each According to His Ability

From the Cabby's Seat

Georgia's Ruling

Girl

He Also Serves

Hearts and Crosses

Hearts and Hands

Helping the Other Fellow

Holding Up a Train

Hostages to Momus

Hygeia at the Solito

Innocents of Broadway

Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet

Jimmy Hayes and Muriel

Law and Order

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

Little Speck in Garnered Fruit

Lord Oakhurst's Curse

Lost on Dress Parade

Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches

Makes the Whole World Kin

Mammon and the Archer

Man About Town

Masters of Arts

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

Modern Rural Sports

Money Maze

Nemesis and the Candy Man

New York by Camp Fire Light

Next to Reading Matter

No Story

October and June

On Behalf of the Management

One Dollar's Worth

One Thousand Dollars

Out of Nazareth

Past One at Rooney's

Phoebe

Proof of the Pudding

Psyche and the Pskyscraper

Queries and Answers

Roads of Destiny

Roses, Ruses and Romance

Rouge et Noir

Round the Circle

Rus in Urbe

Schools and Schools

Seats of the Haughty

Shearing the Wolf

Ships

Shoes

Sisters of the Golden Circle

Smith

Sociology in Serge and Straw

Sound and Fury

Springtime a La Carte

Squaring the Circle

Strictly Business

Strictly Business

Suite Homes and Their Romance

Telemachus, Friend

The Admiral

The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes

The Assessor of Success

The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear

The Badge of Policeman O'Roon

The Brief Debut of Tildy

The Buyer From Cactus City

The Caballero's Way

The Cactus

The Caliph and the Cad

The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock

The Call of the Tame

The Chair of Philanthromathematics

The Champion of the Weather

The Church with an Overshot-Wheel

The City of Dreadful Night

The Clarion Call

The Coming-Out of Maggie

The Complete Life of John Hopkins

The Cop and the Anthem

The Count and the Wedding Guest

The Country of Elusion

The Day Resurgent

The Day We Celebrate

The Defeat of the City

The Detective Detector

The Diamond of Kali

The Discounters of Money

The Dog and the Playlet

The Door of Unrest

The Dream

The Duel

The Duplicity of Hargraves

The Easter of the Soul

The Emancipation of Billy

The Enchanted Kiss

The Enchanted Profile

The Ethics of Pig

The Exact Science of Matrimony

The Ferry of Unfulfilment

The Fifth Wheel

The Flag Paramount

The Fool-Killer

The Foreign Policy of Company 99

The Fourth in Salvador

The Friendly Call

The Furnished Room

The Gift of the Magi

The Girl and the Graft

The Girl and the Habit

The Gold That Glittered

The Greater Coney

The Green Door

The Guardian of the Accolade

The Guilty Party - An East Side Tragedy

The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss

The Hand that Riles the World

The Handbook of Hymen

The Harbinger

The Head-Hunter

The Hiding of Black Bill

The Higher Abdication

The Higher Pragmatism

The Hypotheses of Failure

The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson

The Lady Higher Up

The Last Leaf

The Last of the Troubadours

The Lonesome Road

The Lost Blend

The Lotus And The Bottle

The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

The Making of a New Yorker

The Man Higher Up

The Marionettes

The Marquis and Miss Sally

The Marry Month of May

The Memento

The Missing Chord

The Moment of Victory

The Octopus Marooned

The Passing of Black Eagle

The Pendulum

The Phonograph and the Graft

The Pimienta Pancakes

The Plutonian Fire

The Poet and the Peasant

The Pride of the Cities

The Princess and the Puma

The Prisoner of Zembla

The Proem

The Purple Dress

The Ransom of Mack

The Ransom of Red Chief

The Rathskeller and the Rose

The Red Roses of Tonia

The Reformation of Calliope

The Remnants of the Code

The Renaissance at Charleroi

The Roads We Take

The Robe of Peace

The Romance of a Busy Broker

The Rose of Dixie

The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball

The Rubber Plant's Story

The Shamrock and the Palm

The Shocks of Doom

The Skylight Room

The Sleuths

The Snow Man

The Social Triangle

The Song and the Sergeant

The Sparrows in Madison Square

The Sphinx Apple

The Tale of a Tainted Tenner

The Theory and the Hound

The Thing's the Play

The Third Ingredient

The Trimmed Lamp

The Unknown Quantity

The Unprofitable Servant

The Venturers

The Vitagraphoscope

The Voice of the City

The Whirligig of Life

The World and the Door

Thimble, Thimble

Tictocq

To Him Who Waits

Tobin's Palm

Tommy's Burglar

Tracked to Doom

Transformation of Martin Burney

Transients in Arcadia

Two Recalls

Two Renegades

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

Ulysses and the Dogman

Vanity and Some Sables

What You Want

While the Auto Waits

Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking

Witches' Loaves







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 passing 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-glass 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 nobleman 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 assessment. 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. l4-30.)

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 Japanese 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 assertion, 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
embarrassment 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 basement 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 glass 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 terpsichorean 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 brass 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 and 5/7c. He nodded amiably but coldly at the
long line of Mike's patrons and strolled past then 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 assertion 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 pass-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."

"Smoke up!" said Mac McGowan.

"Genius," repeated the Master--"you've got a talent for genius. Your
brains are in your feet, where a dancer's ought to be. You've been
self-taught until you're almost ruined, but not quite. What you need is
a trainer. I'll take you in hand and put you at the top of the
profession. There's room there for the two of us. You may beat me," said
the Master, casting upon him a cold, savage look combining so much
rivalry, affection, justice, and human hate that it stamped him at once
as one of the little great ones of the earth--"you may beat me; but I
doubt it. I've got the start and the pull. But at the top is where you
belong. Your name, you say, is Robinson?"

"McGowan," repeated the amateur, "Mac McGowan."

"It don't matter," said Delano. "Suppose you walk up to my hotel with
me. I'd like to talk to you. Your footwork is the worst I ever saw,
Madigan--but--well, I'd like to talk to you. You may not think so, but
I'm not so stuck up. I came off of the West Side myself. That overcoat
cost me eight hundred dollars; but the collar ain't so high but what I
can see over it. I taught myself to dance, and I put in most of nine
years at it before I shook a foot in public. But I had genius. I didn't
go too far wrong in teaching myself as you've done. You've got the
rottenest method and style of anybody I ever saw."

"Oh, I don't think much of the few little steps I take," said Mac, with
hypocritical lightness.

"Don't talk like a package of self-raising buckwheat flour," said Del
Delano. "You've had a talent handed to you by the Proposition Higher Up;
and it's up to you to do the proper thing with it. I'd like to have you
go up to my hotel for a talk, if you will."

In his rooms in the King Clovis Hotel, Del Delano put on a scarlet house
coat bordered with gold braid and set out Apollinaris and a box of sweet
crackers.

Mac's eye wandered.

"Forget it," said Del. "Drink and tobacco may be all right for a man who
makes his living with his hands; but they won't do if you're depending
on your head or your feet. If one end of you gets tangled, so does the
other. That's why beer and cigarettes don't hurt piano players and
picture painters. But you've got to cut 'em out if you want to do mental
or pedal work. Now, have a cracker, and then we'll talk some."

"All right," said Mac. "I take it as an honor, of course, for you to
notice my hopping around. Of course I'd like to do something in a
professional line. Of course I can sing a little and do card tricks and
Irish and German comedy stuff, and of course I'm not so bad on the
trapeze and comic bicycle stunts and Hebrew monologues and----"

"One moment," interrupted Del Delano, "before we begin. I said you
couldn't dance. Well, that wasn't quite right. You've only got two or
three bad tricks in your method. You're handy with your feet, and you
belong at the top, where I am. I'll put you there. I've got six weeks
continuous in New York; and in four I can shape up your style till the
booking agents will fight one another to get you. And I'll do it, too.
I'm of, from, and for the West Side. 'Del Delano' looks good on
bill-boards, but the family name's Crowley. Now, Mackintosh--McGowan, I
mean--you've got your chance--fifty times a better one than I had."

"I'd be a shine to turn it down," said Mac. "And I hope you understand I
appreciate it. Me and my cousin Cliff McGowan was thinking of getting a
try-out at Creary's on amateur night a month from to-morrow."

"Good stuff!" said Delano. "I got mine there. Junius T. Rollins, the
booker for Kuhn & Dooley, jumped on the stage and engaged me after my
dance. And the boards were an inch deep in nickels and dimes and
quarters. There wasn't but nine penny pieces found in the lot."

"I ought to tell you," said Mac, after two minutes of pensiveness, "that
my cousin Cliff can beat me dancing. We've always been what you might
call pals. If you'd take him up instead of me, now, it might be better.
He's invented a lot of steps that I can't cut."

"Forget it," said Delano. "Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
of every week from now till amateur night, a month off, I'll coach you.
I'll make you as good as I am; and nobody could do more for you. My
act's over every night at 10:15. Half an hour later I'll take you up and
drill you till twelve. I'll put you at the top of the bunch, right where
I am. You've got talent. Your style's bum; but you've got the genius.
You let me manage it. I'm from the West Side myself, and I'd rather see
one of the same gang win out before I would an East-Sider, or any of the
Flatbush or Hackensack Meadow kind of butt-iners. I'll see that Junius
Rollins is present on your Friday night; and if he don't climb over the
footlights and offer you fifty a week as a starter, I'll let you draw it
down from my own salary every Monday night. Now, am I talking on the
level or am I not?"

Amateur night at Creary's Eighth Avenue Theatre is cut by the same
pattern as amateur nights elsewhere. After the regular performance the
humblest talent may, by previous arrangement with the management, make
its debut upon the public stage. Ambitious non-professionals, mostly
self-instructed, display their skill and powers of entertainment along
the broadest lines. They may sing, dance, mimic, juggle, contort,
recite, or disport themselves along any of the ragged boundary lines of
Art. From the ranks of these anxious tyros are chosen the professionals
that adorn or otherwise make conspicuous the full-blown stage.
Press-agents delight in recounting to open-mouthed and close-eared
reporters stories of the humble beginnings of the brilliant stars whose
orbits they control.

Such and such a prima donna (they will tell you) made her initial bow to
the public while turning handsprings on an amateur night. One great
matinee favorite made his debut on a generous Friday evening singing
coon songs of his own composition. A tragedian famous on two continents
and an island first attracted attention by an amateur impersonation of a
newly landed Scandinavian peasant girl. One Broadway comedian that turns
'em away got a booking on a Friday night by reciting (seriously) the
graveyard scene in "Hamlet."

Thus they get their chance. Amateur night is a kindly boon. It is
charity divested of almsgiving. It is a brotherly hand reached down by
members of the best united band of coworkers in the world to raise up
less fortunate ones without labelling them beggars. It gives you the
chance, if you can grasp it, to step for a few minutes before some badly
painted scenery and, during the playing by the orchestra of some ten or
twelve bars of music, and while the soles of your shoes may be clearly
holding to the uppers, to secure a salary equal to a Congressman's or
any orthodox minister's. Could an ambitious student of literature or
financial methods get a chance like that by spending twenty minutes in a
Carnegie library? I do not not trow so.

But shall we look in at Creary's? Let us say that the specific Friday
night had arrived on which the fortunate Mac McGowan was to justify the
flattering predictions of his distinguished patron and, incidentally,
drop his silver talent into the slit of the slot-machine of fame and
fortune that gives up reputation and dough. I offer, sure of your
acquiescence, that we now forswear hypocritical philosophy and bigoted
comment, permitting the story to finish itself in the dress of material
allegations--a medium more worthy, when held to the line, than the most
laborious creations of the word-milliners....

(Page of O. Henry's manuscript missing here.)

easily among the wings with his patron, the great Del Delano. For,
whatever footlights shone in the City-That-Would-Be-Amused, the freedom
of their unshaded side was Del's. And if he should take up an amateur--
see? and bring him around--see? and, winking one of his cold blue eyes,
say to the manager: "Take it from me--he's got the goods--see?" you
wouldn't expect that amateur to sit on an unpainted bench sudorifically
awaiting his turn, would you? So Mac strolled around largely with the
nonpareil; and the seven waited, clammily, on the bench.

A giant in shirt-sleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches
had been taken by surgeons from time to time, i. e., with a long stick,
looped at the end. He was the man with the Hook. The manager, with his
close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy
manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of
the amateurs. The last of the professional turns--the Grand March of the
Happy Huzzard--had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their
blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage. The man in the
orchestra who played the kettle-drum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper,
whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had
wiped his brow. The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.

While the orchestra plays the famous waltz from "The Dismal Wife," let
us bestow two hundred words upon the psychology of the audience.

The orchestra floor was filled by People. The boxes contained Persons.
In the galleries was the Foreordained Verdict. The claque was there as
it had originated in the Stone Age and was afterward adapted by the
French. Every Micky and Maggie who sat upon Creary's amateur bench, wise
beyond their talents, knew that their success or doom lay already meted
out to them by that crowded, whistling, roaring mass of Romans in the
three galleries. They knew that the winning or the losing of the game
for each one lay in the strength of the "gang" aloft that could turn the
applause to its favorite. On a Broadway first night a wooer of fame may
win it from the ticket buyers over the heads of the cognoscenti. But not
so at Creary's. The amateur's fate is arithmetical. The number of his
supporting admirers present at his try-out decides it in advance. But
how these outlying Friday nights put to a certain shame the Mondays,
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and matinees of the Broadway
stage you should know....

(Here the manuscript ends.)




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