Chapter IV: Part 4

This same man sat yesterday in the living room of his country home
with a perpetual grin on his face and a heartful of joy. He knew
that every living man of that party of jokesters was suffering
something approximating the torments he suffered on that night of
nights and that he had stirred up more trouble in a score of
households than a half a hundred genuine vampires might have
succeeded in doing.

Opportunity chose the disguise of a theatrical press agent when she
finally knocked after all these years—which statement leads
naturally to an account of the real inside of the story of the
projected millionaires’ chorus girl joy ride party which amused and
startled this city yesterday.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Seventeen

The advance sale of seats for the engagement of the Frolics opened that morning. Jimmy Martin stood chatting with Manager George Seymour in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre and watching the long queue of prospective ticket purchasers which stretched out to the sidewalk and curved up the street for nearly half a block. Jimmy couldn’t resist gloating just a little bit. He had adopted a more or less casual, “I told you so” attitude the day before when the first story appeared, but this morning he just naturally expanded.

“Well, Georgie old man,” he remarked cheerily. “You’ve got to give him credit. The kid’s clever.”

“What kid?” asked Mr. Seymour.

“That Martin fellow ahead of the ‘Frolics.’ I told you stirring up towns was a specialty of his. He certainly handed this one a jolt. Do you hear ’em all talking about this morning’s yarn? It’s the biggest press story in years.”

“Just luck—dumb luck.”

“Pretty good for the little old showshop and the little old show, though, you’ve got to admit. Come on, Georgie, act human. Own up that if it hadn’t been for the big idea I led in by the hand, little old Robert B. Luck wouldn’t have had a chance to sit in and draw five cards.”

“Say,” remarked Seymour irrelevantly, “did you know Meyerfield was coming over this morning? He phoned me from Washington last night after you’d gone.”

“I didn’t know it,” responded Jimmy, “but it’s music to my ears. I want to be lingering around when he lamps this line. You know he told me to smear the girls all over the front page, but he didn’t say anything about doing it two days running.”

Jimmy strolled down the lobby and loitered near the slow moving line. He felt a pleasurable little thrill as he listened to the comments on the Bulletin’s story. He walked out to the street and ran his eye along the queue that nearly reached the corner. Then a taxi drove up and Meyerfield alighted. Jimmy caught a flash of the Bulletin sticking out of the manager’s overcoat pocket. So he’d seen the story already, he thought. Well, he’d try to be modest.

“Hello, Martin,” said Meyerfield, holding out a clammy hand and giving Jimmy a barely perceptible grip. “Glad I caught you. Pittsburg’s cancelled and we’re going straight through to Boston from here. You’d better duck over there right away. Come back to the office a minute. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

The manager gave the line a look of quick appraisal as he passed quickly back to Seymour’s office. Jimmy followed him, a little shade downcast at the failure of his employer to make mention of his achievement. Meyerfield greeted Seymour pleasantly, slid into a chair, slowly lit a cigar and assumed his most judicial manner.

“Martin,” he said presently. “I want to talk to you about these stories that have been running in the Bulletin. Now——”

“Some little smear, eh?”

“It’s a smear all right, but it isn’t the kind of publicity I want.”

“But,” Mr. Meyerfield,” broke in Jimmy incredulously. “Did you see the line? Why——”

“Yes, I saw the line, but that doesn’t mean everything. It’s just a little flash in the pan, and besides it’s dangerous stuff—why you can’t tell what would come of it. Someone told me on the train coming over that there was a quarter of a billion dollars represented by the names in that story.”

“But that’s just why it’s good stuff! The more important the people——”

“I wish you wouldn’t interrupt me,” snapped Meyerfield. “I’ve got a silent partner in New York—a big banker—he’s going to back my new summer show. Why, if he ever gets wise to this stuff you can’t tell what’d happen. He may know some of these fellows you’ve mixed up in this story and he may call the whole thing off. You came pretty near getting me in Dutch. Maybe you have. You’d better pull a new line of stuff over in Boston. This kind’ll never do.”

He watched Jimmy narrowly to see how that ordinarily enthusiastic young gentleman was responding to this line of talk. Jimmy’s first expression of bewilderment was replaced by one of great anxiety.

“All right, Mr. Meyerfield,” he said deferentially. “You know best. You’ve been at it longer than I have, and, of course, you know the show business from more angles than I do. I’m sorry it happened. I didn’t understand. I’ll try and pull something different over in Boston.”

“That’s it,” beamed Meyerfield. “The fireworks stuff is all right, but sticking to facts and real legitimate publicity is what lasts. We’ll let by-gones be has-beens. You’d better start on the earliest train possible. By the way, Miss Bellairs is going to lay off for a couple of weeks after our opening here. Her doctor says she’ll have a six month’s session in a sanitarium if she doesn’t, but we can get by that all right. You mustn’t let a word of this get out. You understand?”

“Sure I understand,” replied Jimmy. “Who’s going on in her place?”

“Little Leona LeClaire,” said Meyerfield. “It’s a chance to put her on in the leading role, but I think she’ll fill the bill all right. She’s been under-studying all season.”

“I get you, Mr. Meyerfield. I’ll try and pull something different.”

“That’s the talk,” replied the manager, extending a fishy hand again.

As the door swung shut on the press agent, Meyerfield turned to Seymour and gave him a prodigious wink.

“How do you like my work, George?” he asked expansively.

“I don’t understand,” puzzled the theatre manager. “What do you mean? I thought that newspaper stuff was damned good, if you ask me. Best thing pulled off here in years.”

“Of course it was George,” responded Meyerfield with an air of great wisdom. “It was one of the best ever, but if I told that fresh gink I thought it was, there’d be no holding him. He’d take the bit in his teeth and bolt down Main street. He’d begin to think he was worth a thousand dollars a minute. Birds like that have to be held down. Don’t let ’em ever think they’re good, I know how to handle all his kind.”

* * * * *

Meyerfield’s office boy dumped a big pile of Boston Sunday papers on his desk the following Monday morning. The manager opened the Press and turned to the theatrical page. He skimmed it hurriedly and then uttered a low moan. Staring him in the face was a double column picture of Leona Le Claire. Over it was a headline which read:

PRIMA DONNA’S ILLNESS
GIVES CHORUS GIRL
A BIG OPPORTUNITY
––––

A story detailing the facts about Bessie Bellairs’ threatened breakdown followed, together with some account of the stage beginnings of the understudy. Meyerfield frantically looked through the other papers and found the photograph of the Le Claire girl featured in each one of them with practically the same story. He called his stenographer and angrily dictated this telegram:

JAMES MARTIN,
AGENT MEYERFIELD’S FROLICS,
STAR THEATRE, BOSTON, MASS.
WHY DID YOU PRINT THAT BONE-HEAD
STORY ABOUT UNDERSTUDY
AFTER MY INSTRUCTIONS TO THE CON-
TRARY—YOU’RE RUINING MY BUSINESS
—WIRE IMMEDIATELY.
MEYERFIELD.

This answer came back—collect—in an hour and a half:

MAURICE MEYERFIELD,
1426 BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY.
GO OUT AND PLAY WITH THE CHIPPY
BIRDS. IF YOU WANT TO PUT ANYTHING
OVER ON ME YOU’LL HAVE TO
SET YOUR ALARM CLOCK EARLIER—I
RESIGN—I’M OFF SONG AND DANCE
SHOWS FOR LIFE—NOTHING BUT highbrow
STUFF FOR MINE FROM NOW ON—HAVE
SIGNED TO GO AHEAD OF OLGA
STEPHANO IN HEDDA GABLER, BY
HENRI K. IBSEN.
MARTIN.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Eighteen

A letter from Lolita, received in Cleveland a few weeks later while Jimmy was on the first lap of his transcontinental journey as press agent extraordinary for Madame Olga Stephano, the noted exponent of Ibsen, sent the dark clouds which had given him an extremely low visibility scurrying like mist before the sun and shot his blood pressure up almost to the danger point.

Lolita admitted the justice of Jimmy’s objection to “Ursula’s Undies,” and sent word that she had finally ceased her connection with that organization and was “doing bits” with a stock company in Mt. Vernon. If Jimmy would only forgive her she’d heed his advice on all occasions in the future. Jimmy, in a mood of extreme jubilation, had sent her a seventy-three word night letter and had retired early.

When he bounded out of his bed in the Carlton Hotel the next morning and looked over a copy of the Star which a thoughtful management had slid under his door, he began to radiate gladness and to impart tidings of good cheer. Little Sunshine, the sweet young orphan in the story book, who went around making folks forget their troubles by telling them that abscessed teeth and carbuncles were blessings in disguise, had nothing on him.

He trilled a merry roundelay while he bathed and shaved, and he felt so good that he tossed a “good morning, kid” to a pert little sparrow who was hopping about on the fire escape outside the open window.

Jimmy had a well forged alibi for his exuberance of spirits, quite apart from the resumption of diplomatic relations with the fair Lolita. He had just performed that fascinating operation known in the patois of the profession as “putting one over.” The patient who had submitted to his deft scalpel was no less a personage than E. Cartwright Jenkins, dramatic editor of the Star. E. Cartwright Jenkins was the alpha and omega, the guardian angel of the drama in that corner of the world.

It is only fair to state that just one month before Jimmy’s advent on the scene, E. Cartwright had declared war to the death on the bureau of publicity and promotion. He had issued a manifesto which took in everyone from the humblest representatives of a “Tom show” to the avaunt couriers of the actors and actresses deemed worthy of favorable mention by the critics of the Big Town.

The Jenkins’ ire had been aroused by a neat little yarn submitted by a modest young gentleman with mild blue eyes who had attested to its accuracy on the sacred honor of his grandsires. The subsequent developments had almost involved the Star in an expensive libel suit and certain blistering remarks from the owner and publisher of the paper, directed at the dramatic editor’s head, had resulted in the issuance of the aforementioned ultimatum. The manager of the Standard Theatre had shown Jimmy the letter containing it.

“We shall accept from the theatre,” the letter ran, “only the briefest sort of a general preliminary announcement giving the name of the play and the players concerned. Press agents’ contributions are not wanted and will not be used. It will not be necessary for them to call to pay their respects. We will take those for granted.”

As Jimmy sat on the edge of his bed and read the dramatic page of the Star over again he chuckled gleefully. Confronting him was a three column head which read: “Defense and a Rebuttal.” Underneath it was a thousand word letter addressed to the dramatic editor and signed “Very Respectfully Yours, James T. Martin.” Following it was a long piece bearing the signature of E. Cartwright Jenkins.

The letter was a work of surpassing art which had been jointly composed the day before by Jimmy and a reporter on the rival Inquirer who had covered “sports” with him in days gone by on a St. Louis paper and who had a freely flowing repertoire of adjectives at his command that was dazzling in its completeness. It was a protest against the Star’s embargo on theatrical tidings and a defense of the ancient and honorable calling of press agent. It was cunningly interlarded here and there with oily and unctuous references to the supreme wisdom of Mr. Jenkins.

That worthy gentleman was appealed to as “the recognized authority on all things pertaining to the serious drama in this part of the United States” and as a “patron of the seven arts whose causeries are the delight of the cultured and the despair of the untutored.” Mention was made of the discouragement such worthy artists as Madame Stephano met with as a result of the refusal of the Star to co-operate in the movement for the uplift of the stage, etc., etc.

“That’ll get that old bird,” Jimmy had remarked to his friend after the latter had explained what the “seven arts” were. “He’s the chairman of the executive committee of the I-Hate-Myself Club.”

Jimmy had had prophetic vision. E. Cartwright had fallen into the trap. He had printed the letter in full and he had followed it with certain remarks of his own in which he regretted that the new rule interfered with the “proper exploitation of such representative and distinguished players as Madame Stephano,” etc., etc.

The press agent took out a lead pencil and began underscoring the name of his star every time it appeared in both his letter and the dramatic editor’s subjoined comment.

“Fourteen times,” he chuckled to himself. “The poor old boob.”

He stuck his derby on his head a bit rakishly, reached for a silver topped walking stick and started a progress down to the lobby that was a continuous round of cheery greetings. He joked with the chambermaid he saw entering the room next his own; exchanged a bit of badinage with another who was loitering near the elevator, and playfully slapped the elevator boy on the back with his folded newspaper. He maintained this exalted mood throughout breakfast during which meal he again counted over the “Madame Stephanos” on the sixth page to see if he’d made a mistake in his previous reckoning.

After breakfast he strolled out into the lobby again and over to the cigar counter. As he pointed to a box in the case marked “50¢” each, he beamed at the slender blonde who was reaching to serve him and the blonde beamed back.

“Say, sister,” he asked pleasantly, “how’d you like a couple of seats for the show Monday night at the Standard?”

“Fine,” replied the young woman. “What is it?”

“Olga Stephano,” returned the press agent as he reached for his pass pad and his fountain pen.

“She’s that Russian actress, ain’t she, that plays in those highbrow plays?”

“That’s right,” replied Jimmy. “Ibsen stuff, but she’s a bear at it. She makes you tremble and she makes you sigh.”

The blonde person took the proffered pass and folded it carefully.

“I’ll take my sister,” she said. “She’ll have the time of her life if there’s anything sad in it. I must say you press agents are a mighty nice lot of boys. I meet a lot of you fellows in the course of a season and most every one slips me a pass just for sociability. Here comes Mr. Wilson now. He just got in this morning. He told me he’s ahead of some new play they’re trying out for Otis Taber.”

The gentleman who was approaching was a well set-up, prosperous looking man in his early forties who looked more like a bank cashier or a successful professional man than the popular conception of a theatrical advance agent. He was one of that distinguished little group of clever newspapermen who have been lured away from the daily grind of news-gathering or editorial work into the pleasant bypaths of theatrical endeavor and who have found the fascinations of the show world too subtle to resist no matter how hard they try.

“Hello, Jimmy, old man,” he said heartily. “What are you doing out here in Cleveland? I thought you were with ‘Meyerfield’s Frolics’.”

“I was,” replied Jimmy, “but I’m off song and dance shows. I had a run in with Meyerfield.”

“What are you doing?” asked the other.

“I’ve signed up with the little old uplift, Tom,” returned Jimmy. “I’m elevating our well known stage.”

Tom Wilson looked puzzled for a moment.

“You don’t mean to say that you’re ahead of Stephano?” he gasped.

“That’s what,” said Jimmy, with easy assurance. “I knew it would hand a laugh to all of you kid glove scouts, but I’m going to make good even if I am about as much of a highbrow as a bush league second baseman. As a matter of fact I’ve started to clean up already. Have a cigar.”

Mr. Wilson looked in the case and indicated a modestly priced weed. Jimmy held up a deprecatory hand.

“Nothing doing, sister,” he expanded. “Slip him one of those regular smokes.”

His friend picked a thick cigar out of the box the blonde person handed him and looked into Jimmy’s smiling face.

“Say,” he inquired. “What’s the idea? Had a legacy or something?”

Jimmy motioned him towards a large leather sofa in the center of the lobby.

“I’ve just put one over on the censor,” he exulted, as he settled down, “and I just naturally feel a little frisky. You don’t mind if I pin a few war crosses on my chest, do you?”

“Not at all,” replied the other good naturedly. “Fire ahead.”

Jimmy opened the folded newspaper in his hand and passed it to his brother agent with a playful little flourish. As the latter read the indicated section Jimmy watched him out of the corner of his eye carefully looking for signs of approval. Along about the second paragraph a knowing smile began to curl the corners of Mr. Wilson’s mouth. His companion heaved a sigh of profound satisfaction and lolled back at peace with all the vasty universe.

“That’s a pretty good start,” commented the other handing the paper back. “Rather a choice line of language, too.”

“You said something,” returned Jimmy. “I’ve got a date with a couple of those words the next time I run into a dictionary. I betcha old E. Cartwright never gets wise. Nothing succeeds like the little old salve.”

When the meeting of Local No. 78 of the Publicity Promoters’ Mutual Admiration Society adjourned about ten minutes later, Tom Wilson inquired if Jimmy was planning any more attacks on the common enemy. The latter yawned in simulation of great nonchalance.

“Oh, I’ve got a few ideas I hope to put into general circulation before the day is over,” he remarked casually. “Old Henry P. Inspiration has been working overtime for me since I turned highbrow. I’ll walk down to the theatre with you.”

Jimmy’s imagination indulged in grand and lofty tumbling on the way to the playhouse. It also soared and it may be stated, with due regard for veracity, that it looped the loop and otherwise comported itself in a highly sensational manner. If he had voiced only half of the weird notions for publicity that came to him, Tom Wilson would have undoubtedly felt constrained to take him firmly by the arm and lead him to an alienist. Jimmy’s mind always worked that way when he was particularly exalted. Usually there were one or two of the wild ideas that surged within him that could afterwards stand the cold light of reason and that served as the basis of successful onslaughts on the custodians of newspaper space.

As the pair approached the big skyscraper that housed the Star, Jimmy turned to his companion.

“You don’t mind if I drop in here and correct an ad proof, do you?” he asked.

The other shook his head and they both entered the business office of the newspaper. Directly confronting them was a huge sign hung over the counter. It carried this legend in large letters:

THE STAR’S APPLE PIE
CONTEST IS NOW ON
ENTER YOUR PIES EARLY

Jimmy stood still and let the words sink in. They bore to him a message of infinite hope. He leaned over eagerly to the young woman behind the counter.

“Say, miss,” he inquired. “Where can I get the dope on this pie contest?”

“Miss Slosson, the pie editor—right in the back of the office here,” responded the girl.

Jimmy grabbed Tom Wilson by the arm and led him towards the rear of the room.

“I’m going to put it over on this sheet again just for luck,” he confided.

A sign reading, “Enter Your Pies Here,” attracted them to a railed-off corner of the big office room. A stout woman in the skittish forties, who was dressed like an ingenue, looked up at them from behind a table on which a number of luscious looking apple pies reposed. On shelves on the wall behind her, scores of other pies, all tagged, were arranged.

“Is this contest open to anyone?” inquired Jimmy bowing pleasantly.

“Certainly,” gushed the pie editor. “I’m so glad to see gentlemen in this office. So many women have been in since we opened this contest that it makes one feel rather lonesome for the stronger sex. Do you wish to enter a pie?”

“Yes, m’am,” replied Jimmy promptly.

“Oh, a gentleman cook,” Miss Slosson rattled on. “How utterly adorable. Do you know I’ve always felt that there was no reason on earth why a man shouldn’t take a hand in the kitchen if he chose. It’s only a foolish convention——”

“Please, Miss Slosson,” broke in Jimmy drowning out a chuckle from Tom Wilson which seriously threatened to develop into a ribald laugh, “please—the pie I want to enter wasn’t baked by myself. It isn’t baked yet by anyone. I wanted to know if you’d be interested in having a pie entered by Madame Olga Stephano?”

“You mean the Russian actress who’s coming to the Standard next week?” asked Miss Slosson.

“Yes, m’am,” replied Jimmy. “I’m her manager and I just happened to see the announcement of your contest and I remembered that she’s a great cook and I thought perhaps you’d like to have her enter in the pie stakes—that is, I mean I thought you’d like to have her bake a pie and send it in. Apple pies are her specialty. Mr. Wilson here and myself ate one cooked by her own hand last summer down at her country home on Long Island. Remember that pie, Mr. Wilson?”

Jimmy’s confrere was equal to the emergency.

“I should say I did,” he quickly replied in his most dignified manner. “How could I ever forget? It was a poem, a real lyric bit of pastry.”

“This is wonderful,” gurgled Miss Slosson, “perfectly wonderful! It will give just the filip to this thing that I’ve been after. We can challenge the women of the home to equal the culinary efforts of the women of the stage. You understand, of course, that we must insist upon your entry being bona-fide. We must have assurance that the pie has actually been baked by Madame Stephano. How will she be able to bake it and how will you get it here? Our contest closes the day after tomorrow, you know.”

“That’ll be all right, Miss Slosson,” returned Jimmy. “I’ll get her on the long distance phone just as soon as I can get back to my hotel. She’s playing in Chicago and she’s stopping with friends in a private home. She’ll bake it right away and I’ll get her to ship it right through by express. She’ll be tickled to death. The home is everything to her. Most domestic little woman I ever met.”

“Isn’t that too delightful,” responded the pie editor. “Some of them are that way I suppose. I wonder if you have any pictures of her that I could use?”

Jimmy turned a glance toward his companion in which there was a gleam of triumph as he began to unbuckle the leather case he always carried with him.

“I think that it’s just possible I may have one or two right here with me,” he said. “Yes, isn’t that lucky? Do you care for any of these?”

He handed a half dozen assorted pictures of the great Russian actress across the table. Miss Slosson picked out three of them.

“I’ll use one tomorrow morning with a long story about her entrance,” she said, “and I’ll use one the day after, too. Tomorrow I’ll run a picture of Mrs. Jefferson Andrews, one of our society leaders who has entered, right opposite Mme. Stephano’s. It’s a perfectly darling idea. Thank you so much and be sure and get her on the phone right away and don’t forget that the contest closes at six o’clock Thursday evening.”

Jimmy didn’t say a word until they reached the sidewalk. Then he turned to his friend.

“Say, Tom,” he remarked, “you don’t mind waiting a minute while I pin on the little old Croy de Gerre thing, do you? What do you think about the way I worked the bunk on Sarah Ann Slosson? Ain’t she just the cutest thing?”

Tom Wilson looked at him rather cynically.

“How are you going to go through with it?” he asked quietly.

“How am I going to go through with it?” echoed Jimmy. “Why I’m going to do just what I said I was going to do. I’m going to call up the beautiful star and get her to bake that pie or have someone else bake it and I’m going to call up Jordan, the company manager and have him tend to the shipping. I’ll get her to write a little note in her own handwriting about the joys of kitchen life that they can use for a big splash.”

“You will, eh,” retorted Wilson. “You talk as if you’d never met this Stephano person.”

“I haven’t,” admitted Jimmy. “I joined the show by wire. This is my first town. They sent all the dope on by mail and I’m going to duck back here next week for the big pow-wow. What are you getting at?”

“Oh, nothing much,” replied the other, “only you hadn’t better call her up or Jordan either. You say you were hired by wire. Well, you’d be fired the same way.”

“I don’t get your comedy, Tom,” cut in Jimmy a bit uneasily.

His friend put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and spoke to him earnestly.

“It isn’t comedy, old man,” he said quietly. “I thought you knew all about that ladybird. Pie contests aren’t in her line. Now don’t misunderstand me. It’s great publicity. I know that and I’m for it strong and any regular actress with any real sense of values would be, too, but this Stephano female isn’t that kind of a person. She looks after her dignity more carefully than most women look after an only child. I happened to be in Washington last season when she let poor Charlie Thompson out.”

“What did he do?” inquired Jimmy cautiously.

“Well, Charlie never started well. I could figure that he wouldn’t last when I caught a flash of the proof for his Sunday ad lying on Seymour’s desk over in Baltimore the week before. It read, “Olga Stephano in Ibsen’s, ‘A Doll’s House’—Bring the Kiddies.” I took Charlie aside and killed that, and I tried to put him wise, but he fell down in Washington.”

“What’d he do over there?” persisted Jimmy anxiously.

Wilson retailed at length the harrowing details of the yarn that rang the death knell for Charlie Thompson. Madame Stephano had played the capital on Easter week and Charlie had planted a story in all the Monday papers stating that she would honor the egg-rolling festivities on the White House lawn with her sacred presence. The story further had it that she would sit on the grassy sward atop a little hillock and personally autograph one egg for each little child who came up to her. It also set forth the delectable information that she was prepared to subsequently roll these eggs down the hill with her own fair hands for the delight and edification of the young ones.

“I’m reliably informed that when she saw that story in print she had to be forcibly restrained from jumping out of the eleventh story window of her hotel,” concluded Wilson. “Charlie got his in Pittsburgh that night. That egg rolling stunt isn’t any worse than a pie contest.”

Jimmy’s enthusiasm, during this narrative, had slowly slipped from him like a discarded garment.

“What do you think I’d better do, Tom?” he asked.

“If I were you, Jimmy,” said his friend gently, “I’d go back in there and call the whole thing off.”

A hurt look crept into the eyes of the exploiter of Madame Olga Stephano.

“Gee, Tom,” he murmured. “I couldn’t do that; little old Arthur S. Family Pride and I are still buddies. I’ve got to go through, clean through. I just couldn’t go back there and quit cold turkey before my new found friend, Sarah Ann. Not in a thousand years.”

“Well, there’s one thing certain,” responded the other with a note of finality. “If you call up little Olga or that trained manager of hers they’ll burn you up.”

Jimmy looked sadly at his friend.

“Ain’t it hell, Tom?” he opined grimly. “Ain’t it just double-distilled hell?”

He stood for a moment staring straight ahead as if lost in abstraction. And then he found speech again.

“I won’t call either of ’em up,” he said firmly, “but I’m going to let that story ride. There must be some way out of the mess. Apple pie, eh? I never did like it.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Nineteen

Jimmy wasn’t able to concentrate on his regular duties that afternoon. He had acquired an obsession and he couldn’t shake it off. The problem of how to make good on his promise to the gushy Miss Slosson occupied his entire time and attention. A more careless or indifferent wayfarer in the field of theatrical publicity might have been content to let that plump and pleasing person print her story on the following day and let it go at that, neglecting to follow the idea up and failing to redeem his pledges. Jimmy knew a dozen of his confreres who would just drop the thing on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread, but he wasn’t that kind of press agent. He didn’t know it, but he was really a great creative artist in his own sphere and he got just the same inner satisfaction out of seeing his ideas blossom into realities that a great painter gets as he watches an imagined color harmony spring into life on the easel before him, or that a stylist thrills to when he achieves a perfect phrase after a tiresome search for the inevitable word.

The thought of apple pie haunted him. He just had to have one delivered from Chicago for Miss Slosson, but how to accomplish this feat without notifying Madame Stephano or her manager worried him. He didn’t know anyone in that city he could trust to ship one on in time and he rather figured that even if he did wire or telephone an acquaintance there the latter would take the request as a weird practical joke of some sort and pay no serious attention to it.

He found himself out in the street peering into bakeshop windows and critically appraising the more or less appetizing pastry displayed therein. No use to buy one of those pies and attempt to work it off on Miss Slosson, he thought. They were all too obviously the apple pies of commerce, pale, anaemic affairs bearing not even a remote resemblance to the succulent product of the home kitchen. His artist’s soul revolted at the thought of utilizing one of them to further his nefarious designs.

He exhausted the possibilities of the bakeries on three of the principal avenues in the center of the city and worked himself into a fine frenzy of despair from which he sought relief in a motion picture theatre. What was programmed as a Nonpareil Comedy was unfolding itself on the screen when he entered and just as he slid into a seat in the back row he beheld a large object hurtling through the air propelled by the principal comedian. It struck the comedy villain of the piece full in the face with a disastrously liquid and messy result.

“My God, apple pie,” murmured Jimmy to himself as he clambered out into the aisle, barking the shins and stirring up the latent profanity of an irascible looking man who had slipped into a seat alongside him.

He met Tom Wilson again that evening in the hotel lobby and they went into dinner together.

“Don’t ask me about that story, Tom,” he pleaded as they sat down. “I want to forget it for a little while.”

And he did. The dinner was excellent, the waiter was alert and extremely polite and his companion unbosomed himself of a flow of anecdotes that kept him in a constant state of merriment.

“Mighty good dinner, Tom,” he remarked heartily near the end of the meal, “and mighty fine service.”

The waiter cleared away the dishes and presented the menu to Jimmy.

“If I may be permitted, sir,” he said deferentially, “I might suggest that the apple pie is excellent tonight.”

Jimmy pushed his chair back from the table with such violence that he almost upset it.

“You’ll be permitted to take a punch in the eye, Mr. Fresh,” he said bitterly and then hastened to apologize.

His companion laughed uproariously.

“Still on your mind, Jimmy?” he inquired.

“Yes,” retorted the other; “seems like we’re hooked up to do a double act for life.”

Jimmy had a sleepless night. Every time he dropped off into a fitful slumber he was bothered by a dream in which apple pie played a central part. Once he dreamt that he was chained to a pillar in a great room and that Madame Stephano was forcing him to devour an apparently inexhaustible pie which stood on a table and which she fed him with an enormous long handled spoon. He choked so hard on one spoonful that he awoke with a start.

At the breakfast table he read Miss Slosson’s promised story in the Star. It was all that the most ambitious purveyor of publicity could desire. There was a four column headline reading:

STEPHANO HURLS
HER ROLLING PIN
INTO THE RING
––––
Russian-American Actress Soon
to Visit This City Enters the
Star’s Popular Pie Contest.
––––
STAGE VERSUS THE HOME
––––

Underneath was a big picture of a kitchen table on each side of which a woman was shown busily engaged in the culinary operations that usually accompany the creation of a pie. The bodies of these feminine figures had been sketched in by an artist, but the heads were excellent half-tone likenesses of Madame Stephano and Mrs. Jefferson Andrews, society leader.

One look at the lay-out simply added to Jimmy’s misery. After that he just _had_ to make good. He strode out of the hotel determined to take a long walk to see if he couldn’t clarify his mental processes and get his imagination oiled up again. He was so busy with his thoughts that he paid little heed to the general direction he was taking and presently found himself in a corner of the city with which he was not familiar. It was a quiet residential section and rows of modest homes of the bungalow type lined both sides of the streets. There was a little group of shops in a stucco building on a corner and as Jimmy passed him he let his eyes drift toward them in a desultory fashion.

Presently he stopped directly in front of one which bore this legend across its front: “The Buy-A-Cake Shop—Home Made Dainties and Pastry.” A pretty girl dressed in snowy white with a cloth in her hand was lifting into the window one of the most appetizing looking pies he had ever seen. It was a single crust affair which had been baked in a deep china dish of large proportions. The pastry looked flaky enough to crumble at the touch and was a color symphony in brown. As Jimmy gazed entranced the girl set down a card in front of the pie. It read: “Mother’s Own Apple Pie.” Opportunity had knocked and Jimmy answered “present.” He rushed into the shop.

“I’ll take that pie, miss,” he said eagerly. “I need it in my business.”

As the young woman turned to take it out of the window Jimmy stopped her for a moment.

“Say,” he said, “I want to send that a long way off and I want you to do it up so that it will stand the journey—you know, keep fresh and everything and not get mussed up.”

“I understand,” responded the girl in white. “I’ll wrap a cloth around it to keep the air out, and I’ll fix it up in a strong pasteboard box that I’ve got here. Can you wait?”

“Sure I can,” returned Jimmy. “That’s what I’ve been doing for twenty-four hours. I’ll smoke a cigarette outside. Knock on the window when you’re ready.”

A half an hour later he breezed into the office of the Standard Theatre with a large bundle under his arm and greeted Tom Wilson, who was looking through the morning mail.

“I hear you’ve got a date with an apple pie this morning,” grinned his friend.

“Here’s the party,” replied Jimmy setting the bundle down on the table. “The kind that mother used to make out in the summer kitchen under the lilac vines. You were in for the first act. Do you want to stick around and watch me take the curtain calls at the finish?”

“Sure,” returned Tom Wilson.

“Then come on back stage,” said Jimmy, picking up his precious bundle. “I want to interview the house property man. I’ve got to have the right kind of a production for this little stunt.”

The property man proved equal to the occasion, after explanations had been made. He brought out a substantial wooden box and began to fill the bottom of it with crumpled newspapers. Jimmy stopped him.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Never give ’em a chance to have anything on you is always my motto. These are Cleveland papers and this box is supposed to come from Chicago. Maybe someone would notice that. Put your coat on and dust around to that out-of-town newspaper stand over on Superior Avenue and buy a bunch of yesterday’s Chicago papers.”

When the property man came back a few minutes later and began to crumple up the newspapers he brought with him, Jimmy turned to his friend again.

“Not a bad little touch, eh, Tom?” he remarked.

“Immense,” agreed the other sincerely. “I’ve got to hand it to you. You certainly overlook no bets.”

The pasteboard box containing the pie was carefully placed on top of the bed of newspapers and other papers were packed in tightly around and above it. The lid was nailed solidly on and Jimmy affixed an express label addressed to himself. When the box had been carefully loaded on a push wagon in charge of a small colored boy and was on its way down Euclid Avenue toward the Star office, personally chaperoned by the two press agents, the conspiracy was completed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Twenty

E. Cartwright Jenkins, dramatic editor of the Star, was distinctly displeased with life as a whole and with humanity in general that morning. His professional dignity had been subjected to a series of frontal and flank attacks of great violence for nearly twenty-four hours and the final insult had been handed out by the managing editor who had just left the little cubby hole designated by a painted sign as the “dramatic department.”

E. Cartwright had read Jimmy’s oleaginous epistle three times at the breakfast table the morning before and had left his home in a fine glow of self-approval. In fancy he walked upon the misty mountain tops of high achievement until he reached the Star office and then he found himself hurled suddenly into the well known slough of despond. Billy Parsons, the advertising manager, who met him in the elevator, started it.

“Well, old man,” Billy, said laughingly, “I see they got to you for a home-run this morning with all the bases full.”

E. Cartwright had bristled at this and had expressed himself as not comprehending the esoteric significance of the allusion. Billy had then become more specific.

“They put it over on you,” he replied. “That press agent fellow with Olga Stephano, I mean.”

“Put it over on me?” the dramatic editor had returned. “I don’t exactly understand what you mean.”

“Say, old dear,” Billy had sarcastically responded, “it’s a worse case than I thought it was at first. You’d ought to see a doctor.”

E. Cartwright, who abhorred slang and those who used it, had become quite indignant at this and had insisted upon a clear explanation of what Billy Parsons meant. The latter gentleman obliged him with one. He pointed out, with great clarity, the trick that Jimmy Martin had played on the astute and dignified dramatic editor. He dwelt upon the number of times the name of Madame Stephano had been cunningly inserted into the correspondence and proved that the whole affair was a carefully calculated scheme for the exploitation of that lady.

The blinders of self-esteem having thus been torn from the eyes of the dramatic editor, that gentleman developed a decided distaste for further discussion of the subject and immured himself in his cramped office where he devoted himself to bitter rumination. Throughout the day his fellow laborers in the field of journalism seemed to take a malicious delight in playfully taunting him. On the way home for dinner he had met the dramatic editor of the rival Inquirer and that worthy had added to his fury by remarking, with a twinkle in his eye:

“That was a mighty interesting symposium on Stephano you ran this morning, Jenkins.”

At dinner he startled his sedate and shrinking wife by launching into a profane and pungent diatribe on the subject of press agents and announced his determination to start a nation-wide movement for their suppression and final extermination. He declared, in loud and ringing tones, that nothing but total annihilation of the entire tribe would at all satisfy his wishes in the matter.

The sting of the affair still rankled in his breast when he came down to the office on the following morning. When Nathan, the managing editor, looked in on him he was viciously assailing the dramatic page of a New York Sunday newspaper with a large pair of shears and wishing for a moment, as he clipped out items of theatrical information, that it was one Jimmy Martin instead of an innocent sheet of paper that he was attacking.

“Say, Jenkins,” Nathan remarked casually, “I’ve got a little request to make of your Miss Slosson who’s running this damned pie contest,—it closes today, you know,—is getting swamped downstairs and has sent out an S.O.S. to this floor for assistance. There’s nobody around yet but you. I wish you’d drop down there for an hour or so and give her a hand. Just as soon as one of the cubs show up I’ll send him down to relieve you.”

E. Cartwright reeled under this final blow to his dignity. The ends of his iron-grey walrus moustache dropped a full half inch as he looked up, bewildered.

“Pie contest—Miss Slosson,” he mumbled. “What could I possibly do in connection with that, or with her?”

“Oh, just help her and her assistant unwrap and tag some of the entries,” replied Nathan in a matter-of-fact tone, as he turned quickly to suppress a smile and hurried out of the tiny room.

E. Cartwright uttered a low moan expressive of profound and abysmal woe as he slipped on his coat and prepared to descend to Miss Slosson’s department.

* * * * *

Jimmy and his fellow conspirator found Miss Slosson in her office almost completely hidden by parcels containing pies. They did not notice E. Cartwright at first. That high authority on the spoken and written drama was in the throes of unutterable and indescribable mental anguish at a table fifty feet away untying innumerable bundles and humming a hymn of hate directed at newspaper work in general and soulless managing editors in particular.

The small colored boy, grunting under the weight of the wooden box, deposited the burden on the table.

“Oh, there you are, Mr. Martin,” gurgled Miss Slosson, coming forward and surveying the box with interest, “and what have we here?”

“That’s the little old pie I told you I’d have the madame send on,” replied Jimmy glibly. “She made a mistake and sent it to the theatre. It just came by express a half an hour ago right through from Chicago.”

“Isn’t that perfectly wonderful,” rhapsodized the pie editor. “What did dear Madame Stephano say when you spoke to her over the phone?”

Jimmy paused for a moment before he replied. He had caught a glimpse of the Star’s dramatic editor who had turned and was approaching them. He clutched Tom Wilson’s arm.

“What did she say,” he said abstractedly. “What did she say? Why she said—she said she’d turn down a Drama League luncheon and go right out in the kitchen and slip into a gingham apron, and believe me if you knew how much she thinks of the Drama League, you’d know that was some concession.”

E. Cartwright hadn’t seen them yet. He was apparently almost oblivious of his surroundings as he walked slowly towards Miss Slosson.

“I realize that,” the pie editor was saying. “She has a great, big, generous nature, I’m sure and to think of her being so domesticated, too. Oh, Mr. Martin, I suppose you know Mr. Jenkins, our dramatic editor. He’s kindly volunteered to help me in the closing hours of the contest.”

Jimmy straightened up and assumed his most ingratiating smile. He had met the distinguished critic only once, several years before, and he was fairly certain that he would not be remembered.

“I had the honor of an introduction several seasons ago,” he said suavely, “but it is possible that Mr. Jenkins does not recall me.”

E. Cartwright had given an unconscious start at the sound of the name “Martin,” but he seemed to have no conscious knowledge of Jimmy’s identity. He smiled sadly.

“I don’t seem to place you,” he remarked with a woebegone attempt at civility.

“Mr. Martin is Madame Stephano’s advance manager,” broke in Miss Slosson. “The dear madame has entered a pie in our little contest through him.”

Mr. Jenkins’ facial aspect underwent an instantaneous change. He narrowed his eyes and corrugated his brows and gave other external indications of rapidly mounting wrath. Also his cheeks paled, and it may be further stated that his rather gangling frame became suddenly taut and vibrant. He eyed Jimmy for fully ten seconds and then turned to Miss Slosson.

“It is my duty to inform you, madame,” he said in a voice that was tense with emotion, “that this person is a press agent who will use you for his own selfish ends—a paid hireling of an unscrupulous management which has only one purpose in mind—deceit and rank trickery.”

Jimmy started to expostulate, but Tom Wilson gave him a vicious elbow jab which effectively cut off any utterance on his part. Miss Slosson smiled serenely.

“Don’t be too hard on him, dear Mr. Jenkins,” she remonstrated. “He has been a great help in our effort to raise the general tone of culinary excellence. He represents a most estimable lady, and if she gets a little publicity out of it she deserves it after all the trouble she has gone to—baking a pie with her own hands and sending it on here all the way from Chicago. We mustn’t be too selfish.”

“I warn you, madame, that there is fraud here some place,” persisted the dramatic editor, “downright fraud and deception. These gentlemen have a depraved talent for that sort of thing.”

“Nonsense,” broke in the pie editor beckoning to an office boy whose job it was to open such entries as were encased in substantial packages. As the youngster assailed the box she chirruped on. “I’m using another picture of the clear lady in tomorrow’s paper, Mr. Martin, and I’ll announce the arrival of her contribution in the opening paragraph. I’m just crazy to see it. Quite a large box, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” murmured Jimmy. “She certainly seems to have done the thing up brown.”

He was the picture of serene self-satisfaction as he watched the lid coming off the box. The prospect of triumphing over E. Cartwright a second time filled him with an almost ecstatic joy.

When the lid was removed Mr. Jenkins darted toward the box and pulled out the tufts of crumpled newspapers. He carefully unfolded one and looked at it. Jimmy caught Tom Wilson’s eye at this juncture and winked his off eye prodigiously. E. Cartwright, upon observing the heading and the date line in the paper, threw it down impatiently and began nervously to chew the ends of his moustache.

“We’ve got old George B. Grouch’s goat all right,” confided Jimmy behind his hand.

Miss Slosson untied the string and lifted out the pie which was tightly swathed in a piece of old linen. She undid the wrapping slowly while the interested spectators gathered close around her. The careful young woman in the bake shop had placed a piece of cardboard over the top of the deep china dish, and when this was removed Miss Slosson positively bubbled with delight as she caught sight of the golden brown crust of the wonderful pie.

“It looks perfectly heavenly,” she remarked. “Perfectly heavenly.”

“A masterpiece,” broken in the hitherto silent Mr. Wilson.

“I told you she’d bake one that would win in a walk,” was Jimmy’s contribution to the glad chorus of acclaim.

E. Cartwright didn’t have a word to say. He stood with his hands on his hips watching the two press agents with a look that still betrayed cynical distrust.

“Won’t you please put it over there on that little table all by itself, Mr. Jenkins,” said Miss Slosson. “It certainly deserves a place of honor.”

Mr. Jenkins grunted and hesitated for a moment. He was too chivalrous at heart, however, to refuse to obey a lady’s behest no matter how much humiliation he might suffer. He grasped both sides of the pie-dish firmly, lifted it high in the air and began to turn. Jimmy was looking at him with ill-concealed delight. As he watched a look of intense agony spread over the dramatic editor’s face. The next instant that gentleman dropped the pie with a sharp cry of pain.

“It’s hot,” he screamed, “red hot!”

The dish smashed into a hundred pieces on the counter and the surrounding atmosphere was filled with flying fragments of pie. Jimmy felt something warm and sticky on his face and he noticed with dismay that the front of Miss Slosson’s silk dress was a sorry looking mess. Tom Wilson’s clothes were smeared with debris, too. E. Cartwright was wiping apple juice out of both eyes and uttering words that caused the pulse beats of Madame Stephano’s personal representative to diminish almost to the vanishing point.

“A pair of damned fakirs,” he shouted. “Baked in Chicago, eh, and shipped on here by express! It hasn’t been out of the oven an hour. Thought they’d put one over on us again, did they? I know ’em. I know ’em.”

The tragic climax of Jimmy’s little three act comedy came with such unexpected suddenness that he stood in the midst of the tumult and the shouting like one transfixed. It was a rout, an utter and complete defeat, the most disastrous and the most humiliating of his career. In a flash he pictured it becoming a classic anecdote that would be bandied to and fro by his professional brethren in Pullman smoking rooms and theatre offices for years without number.

He looked up and about him. Enemies were surging toward him from all directions apparently bent on his destruction. And then he remembered Tom Wilson. He turned around. That worthy had departed as if on the wings of the morning. The dishevelled and distraught editor had apparently exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation and was approaching him with a savage look in his eye flanked on one side by a distinguished looking gentleman with a most authoritative manner who had rushed to the scene from a nearby office. Jimmy realized that it was no place or time for heroics. He turned and fled precipitately down an unencumbered aisle in the general direction of the open air.

He caught up with Tom Wilson two blocks down the avenue. That gentleman was still going strong and seemed to need no pace-maker.

“The first bet I ever overlooked, Tom,” he puffed as he swung alongside. “What’ll we do?”