Kid Scanlan

Van Ness puts the gun and the nitro in Tony's pocket.

"Begone, sir!" he says. "I'll jolly well attend to you later!"

Tony gathers up his junk and throwin' a last glare at me and the Kid, beats it.

Van Ness turns to the Kid, stickin' the eyeglass back in the toga.

"Ah – and now, Scanlan," he says, "will you be good enough to explain the cause of the – ah – bitter animosity you have for me?"

The Kid frowns and scratches his head.

"Somebody has been kiddin' you," he tells him. "I ain't got nothin' for you! Where d'ye get that animosity thing?"

Van Ness sighs so hard it like to blowed our hats off.

"It is beastly plain to me," he says, "that I am about as popular in Film City as a cloudburst at a picnic! I am snubbed, ridiculed, vulgarly and subtly insulted! Also I am white and human and – ah – I must confess it has penetrated my skin. You are particularly bitter against me – why?"

The Kid studies him for a minute.

"Listen!" he answers finally. "Are you on the level with this? D'ye really wanna know, or are you simply askin' me so's you can pull one of them witty remarks on the way I answer you —and get walloped on the beak?"

Van Ness did somethin' then I never seen him do before and only once afterward. He grinned! The Roman toga fell off his shoulders, and he leans over with his hands on his hips. On the level, his whole face seemed to change! And then —

Oh, boy!

"Listen, guy!" pipes this big, dignified whatnot. "I'm on the level, all right and I want the lowdown on this thing, d'ye make me?" (Me and the Kid nearly went dead on our feet listenin'.) "As for wallopin' me on the beak, well – you may be welterweight champion out here, but if you start anything with me, I'll remove you from the title, d'ye get that?"

Woof!

The Kid and me falls back against a rock, fightin' for air!

"Oh, Lady!" whispers the Kid, fannin' himself with his hat. "Did you hear what I did?"

"Call me at seven!" I gasps.

"Well – ?" drawls Van Ness, lookin' us over.

"They's just one thing I'd like to know," murmurs the Kid, wipin' his forehead with my handkerchief in the excitement. "What part of dear old England was you born in?"

Van Ness grins some more.

"Brooklyn!" he says, jerkin' out the eye glass again and stickin' it on his eye. "Surely, my man," he goes on, with that old silly stare of his; "surely you have heard of jolly old Brooklyn – what?"

"I know it well!" says the Kid. "It's on the wrong end of the bridge! But where d'ye get the 'my man' thing? And what have you been goin' around like a Swiss duke or somethin', when it turns out you're only a roughneck from Brooklyn? You wanna know why you don't belong, and don't fit in here, eh? Well, you big hick, where d'ye get that Sedate Sam stuff?" He slaps Van Ness on the arm. "Why in the Hail Columbia don't you bust out and giggle now and then, hey?"

"Why don't I?" snarls Van Ness, "Don't you think I'd like to? Don't you think I would if I could, you boob?"

"Would if you could?" repeats the Kid. "What's the matter – have you got lockjaw?"

"No!" roars Van Ness, so sudden that we both sidestepped. "No! Not lockjaw, worse! Dignity!"

"Have you give the mud baths at Hot Springs a play?" I asks.

"Stop it!" he sneers. "Cease that small time comedy! I'm the most dignified person in the world – the undisputed champion! I'm Frowning Frank and Imposing Ike rolled into one. It hurts me more than it does you, but I can't help it! I fail to remember the last time I enjoyed a hearty laugh and I know it will be a darned long space before I'll snicker again. My laugher has gone unused for so long that it's atrophied and won't work. I've tried warming it up by going home at night and guffawing before the mirror, but the result is only a mirthless giggle – a ghostly chortle! Of course, I wouldn't dare attempt to laugh in public!"

"Do what?" asks the Kid.

"Laugh!" answers Van Ness bitterly. "I can't even let myself think of doing it – why, it would ruin me! My dignity is all I have. It's my stock in trade and without it I would lose my income! Were I to unbend and shatter the air with harmless cachinnation, it would be thought at once that I had been drinking!" He stopped and sighed some more. "It began ten years ago," he goes on. "I was playing small parts in a stock company and one week I was cast for a Roman senator. Being anxious to make good, I made that noble so dignified that the local critics dismissed the play with a few paragraphs and gave half a column to my stately bearing! That started it, and from that time I've played nothing but Romans, kings, governors, cardinals and similar roles, calling for my infernal talent in the one direction. Mechanically I grew to playing them on and off, yet all the time within me burns the desire to do rough and tumble, yes, by Heaven, slapstick comedy! But alas, I lack the moral courage to throw off the yoke!"

"Well, Mister Van Ness – " I begins, when the silence begun to hurt, "I – "

"Not Van Ness!" he interrupts. "The name is as false as my manner! My name is Fink, Eddie Fink, and please don't add the Mister. When a lad I had a nickname, but, alas, I – "

"What was it?" butts in the Kid.

He hesitates.

"Well, it was rather frivolous," he says. "As indeed I was myself – a happy, carefree youth! The boys called me Foolish – Foolish Fink!" He throws out his chest like he just realized how he had been honored at the time.

Me and the Kid both had a coughin' fit.

"Let's go over to Montana Bill's," I says, when I thought it was safe to look up, "and we'll talk it over."

"Yeh!" chimes in the Kid. "Over a tray of private stock!" He laughs and slaps alias Van Ness on the shoulder. "Cheer up! Foolish Fink, will you have a little drink? Woof, woof! I'm a poet!"

"Thanks!" says Van Ness. "But I'm on the wagon. I stopped drinking five years ago, because under the influence of alcohol I've been known to act the fool!"

"You ain't the only one!" says the Kid. "Anyhow I never touch it myself and Johnny here only uses it on his hair! But come on over – you can have your pants pressed or take a shine, I'm gonna buy, and you might as well get in on it. Bill's got a laughin' hyena in a cage outside, and maybe you could get him to rehearse you!"

About a week after that, the society bunch in Frisco comes over to Film City to act in a picture for the benefit of the electric fan fund for Greenland, or somethin' like that. About fifty of the future corespondents, known to the trade as the younger set, blows over in charge of a dame who had passed her thirty-sixth birth and bust day when Napoleon was a big leaguer. She had did well by herself though and when dressed for the street, they was harder things to look at than her. Also, when her last husband died, he left her a bankroll that when marked in figures on paper looked like it was the number of Southerners below Washington. A little bit of a guy, which turned around when you yelled "G. Herbert Gale" at him, breezed over with her and at first I had him figured as a detective seekin' divorce evidence, because he stuck to that dame like a cheap vaudeville act does to the American flag. He trailed a few paces behind her everywhere she went, callin' her "Mrs. Roberts-Miller" in public and "Helen Dear" when he figured nobody was listenin'. It was easy to see that he had crashed madly in love with this charmer, but as far as she was concerned they was nothin' stirrin'.

Except that G. Herbert was inclined to be a simp, he wasn't a bad guy at that. He mixed well and bought freely, although he was riveted to the water wagon himself. He bragged to me in fact that the nearest he ever come to alcohol in his life was once when he used it to clean his diamonds.

But G. Herbert was the guy that invented the ancient and honorable order of village cut-ups. I never asked him what the G stood for in his name, I guessed it the first day he was in our midst. It meant "Giggle!" This here Herbert person was a laughin' fool! The first time I talked with him I thought I was cheatin' myself by only bein' Scanlan's manager. I figured I ought to be in vaudeville knockin' 'em dead for five hundred a week, because G. Herbert roared at everything I said. He screamed with mirth at all the old ones and had hysterics over three or four witty remarks I remembered from a show I seen the night of the Johnstown flood. I thought, of course, it was the way I put the stuff over, and I was just gonna give the Kid my fare-you-well, when I seen G. Herbert standin' by a practical undertakers shop that was fixed up for a fillum. The little simp was standin' over a coffin laughin' his head off!

That cured me, but him and the Kid become great little pals. I found out later it was on account of G. Herbert snickerin' at the Kid's comedy. Scanlan hadn't discovered it was a habit with this guy, and he claimed here was a feller that knowed humor when he seen it.

One afternoon I see Scanlan and Miss Vincent whisperin' together like yeggmen outside a postoffice. They called me over, and the Kid tells me that the society bunch was gonna leave us flat on the midnight train, and before they blowed, Potts was gonna give 'em a dinner and dance. All the movie crowd was to mix with Frisco's four hundred, so's that both could enjoy the experience and say they took a chance once in their lives.

But the thing that was botherin' Miss Vincent – (Some dame, that! She was the world's champion woman, believe me!) The thing that worried her was G. Herbert and Helen Dear, alias Mrs. Roberts-Miller. Likin' 'em both, Miss Vincent wanted to hurl 'em together for good and all before the train pulled out.

It seems the only objection the dame had to G. Herbert was the fact that he couldn't keep from laughin'. She had him figured as a eighteen-carat simp and frequently told him so, addin' that she could never marry a man who was shy on dignity. Then she gets a flash at our old pal Jason Van Ness or Eddie Fink, as he claimed, and she fell so hard for him she liked to broke her neck! Here was the only original Sedate Sam! Here was the guy she was willin' and anxious to lead to the altar and then to the old safe deposit vault! He was so handsome! So dignified! Such a splendid actor! That's the stuff she was always handin' poor little G. Herbert and askin' him why he wasn't like that? G. Herbert would shake his head, giggle, and say he didn't know why, but he'd ask his parents.

Van Ness couldn't see Helen Dear with opera glasses. He told me he hated 'em stout, and, if possible, had figured on weddin' somebody within ten years of his age – either way. I then felt it my duty to inform him that her bankroll was stouter than she was. He goes into high speed on the dignity thing and sets sail for Helen Dear like a bloodhound after a nigger. He didn't want to look like a vulgar fortune hunter, he claimed, but he figured if he could get his fingers on a piece of Helen's dough, he could bribe G. Herbert to teach him the art of laughin'.

The Kid tells Miss Vincent to forget about the thing, and he would guarantee that G. Herbert and Helen Dear went away threatenin' to marry each other. She said she'd leave the matter in our hands and held hers out. I shook it and Scanlan kissed it – a trick he stole from Van Ness.

The dinner and dance that night was a knockout! Film City is lit up like a plumber used to be on Saturday night, and the inhabitants is dressed like the people that poses for the ads of any cigarette over fifteen cents a pack. As usual, Miss Vincent had the rest of the dames lookin' like sellin' platers in stake race and, believe me, some of them society girls would have worried Venus. The Kid was so swelled up because she kept within easy call all night that he forgot his promise to fix up G. Herbert with Helen Dear. The latter, as we remark at the laundry, was closer to Van Ness all night than the ocean is to the beach, and it looked like the Kid was gonna have a tough time breakin' 'em up.

Along around eleven, Miss Vincent calls Scanlan aside and reminds him that he had better start workin' for G. Herbert, because they would all be beatin' it for the train in a hour. She also give out that, if he didn't make good, she was off him for life. Scanlan bows – another trick he copped from Van Ness – and takes me away down at the end of the lawn to dope somethin' out.

I tripped over what I thought at first was a dead body and me and the Kid props it up in the light.

"Ha, ha!" it says. "Tony he'sa laugha at you! Tony he'sa laugha at everybody! Bomb Germo! thisa fel' tella me – ha, ha, ha!"

The Kid grunts in disgust, lets go and Tony bounces back on the lawn.

"Stewed to the scalp!" says Scanlan. "Frisk him!"

I run my hands over Tony and bring forth a bottle of gin and another one of bourbon. The Kid looks 'em over, finally stickin' 'em both in his coat pocket.

"Come on!" he tells me. "They's no use hangin' around here. If I don't get back there, some of them Wealthy Willies that have been wishin' all night will be one-steppin' with Miss Vincent!"

"But how about G. Herbert?" I says.

"He's got my best wishes!" growls the Kid. "He's a nice little feller, but that's the best I can do. What d'ye think I am – Cupid?"

"Well, gimme the alcohol then!" I says. "You ain't gonna fall off the wagon are you, when – "

"Shut up, Stupid!" he butts in. "I wouldn't take a drink of this stuff for what Rockefeller gets for overtime! I want to get it away from that wop, so's he'll have somethin' to moan about when he wakes up."

We went back to the party, and a couple of dames standin' at the punch bowl calls to the Kid. He always was a riot with the women! Helen Dear is there with Van Ness, and he's got to where he's pattin' her hand, while G. Herbert stands in back of 'em lookin' like he wished he had some nails to bite.

I come to a table and there's Miss Vincent sittin' alone and she motions me to sit down with her – so's my back would hide her from the rest of the bunch. She says a little bit of society went a long ways with her, and where was the Kid? Before I can answer her along comes Helen Dear and she plumps down at the table and starts to tell us what a magnificent man Mister Van Ness was. She claims she never seen such a perfect gentleman in her life. I liked to snickered out loud at the disappointed way she pulled that one and then the Kid, G. Herbert and Van Ness suddenly comes around a tree and joins the party.

Scanlan winks at Miss Vincent, and she looks at him inquiringly, but he just shakes his head. I noticed that G. Herbert looked kinda sad, and he must have put his giggler away because he just sat lookin' down at the ground. Van Ness is full of life – I never seen him so cheerful – so I figured that while them and the Kid was alone, Van Ness must have told 'em that Helen Dear had proposed or accepted him.

Finally, Helen Dear looks at her wrist watch and says she'll have to tear herself away, because the train leaves in fifteen minutes. She wastes five of that throwin' soulful looks at Van Ness and he give back as good as he got. G. Herbert offers to get her wraps, comin' to life long enough to make the request, but Helen Dear gives him a sneerin' look and says there was servants there for that purpose. It was a terrible throwdown, and Van Ness nearly grinned, but G. Herbert gamely tried a giggle that sounded like the squeak of a stepped-on rat.

While Helen Dear is gettin' into a coat that couldn't have cost a nickel under five thousand bucks, the Kid gets up and calls Van Ness and G. Herbert aside. They was gone about five minutes. When they came back, Helen Dear is just puttin' on her hat and suddenly the thing slips out of her hands and slides down over one eye.

Then – excuse me a minute, I'm in convulsions! I'll never forget it if I live to see Bryan vote against prohibition! There's Helen Dear gettin' red in the face and strugglin' with that hat and —

"Ha, ha, ha, ha!" shrieks Van Ness —the guy that had lost his laugher! – "Ha, ha, ha, ha!" he yells, holdin' the chair so's he can stand up and pointin' at Helen's hat. "You ought to go in vaudeville!" he hollers. "You'd be a riot with that act! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Miss Vincent gasps, the Kid grins, and I all but fainted. Here's this guy laughin' his head off for the first time in ten years and – look at the time he picked to do it! Sweet Cookie!

Helen Dear turns eighteen shades of red and fights for her breath like a fish when you drag it over the side of the boat. Then up steps little G. Herbert. His eyes is kinda glassy, but his face is set and hard. His spine is as straight as a flag pole and he sticks a piece of glass over one eye, just like Van Ness used to do! Dignity? Why he could have took Van Ness when that guy was right —and give him lessons!

"What does this mean, sir!" he says, walkin' up to Van Ness who is holdin' his sides and fallin' off the chair. Laugh? That bird was in hysterics!

"Ha, ha, ha!" bellers Van Ness. "Get a couple of good camera men quick! Ha, ha, ha, ha! It looks like she got hit with a pie!"

"You infernal idiot!" roars G. Herbert. "How dare you laugh at this lady?"

"Oh, boy!" answers Van Ness, finally rollin' off his chair. "Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"Come, Herbert!" pipes Helen. "We will go back together and my answer is Yes! Thank Heaven that man stands exposed in his true character!"

"Thas' right!" nods Herbert, waggin' his head and glarin' at all of us. "C'mon – hic – Cmon, M' dear!"

Somethin' comes staggerin' up and grabs the Kid by the arm. It was Tony.

"Aha!" he yells. "Who'sa taka my bottle gin, bottle bourbon? Sapristi! You bigga stiffa, I – "

The Kid gives him a slow straight arm, and Tony goes over the table backwards, landin' right beside his master.

"No spika da Engleesh!" says Scanlan, as Tony disappears.

I grabbed him by the arm.

"Show me them bottles," I says, gettin' wise in a flash.

The Kid takes out two empty non-refillables and tosses 'em in the grass.

"My!" he says, dreamily. "How that little guy went to it!"

Toot! Toot! Toot! goes the Santa Fe flier pullin' out with G. Herbert and Helen Dear.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha – ho, ho, ho, ho!" screams Van Ness from under the table. "She promised – ha, ha, ha! to cheer me up – hic – ha, ha, ha! and she – hic – certainly – ha, ha, ha! – made good!"

CHAPTER VI

THE UNHAPPY MEDIUM

They may be such a thing as a ghost, but I don't believe it! At the same time, I'm willin' to admit that my feelin's in the matter ain't gonna prove the ruin of the haunted house promoters. They's a whole lot of things which I look on as plain and simple bunk, that the average guy studies at college. But the reason I say they may be, is because when me and Kid Scanlan come back East this year we stopped off somewheres in the hurrah for prohibition part of the country and was showed over what the advertisin' matter admitted to be the greatest bakery in the world.

I think them ad writers was modest fellers. That joint was not only the world's greatest bakery, it was the world's greatest anything!

I never really knowed a thing about bread, except that you put butter on it, until I give that place the up and down.

What I don't know about the staff of life now would never get you through Yale. I might go farther than that and come right out with the fact that I have become a abandoned bread fiend and got to have it or I foam at the mouth, since I seen how it was made at this dough foundry.

A accommodatin' little guy took hold of me and the Kid and showed us all over the different machine shops where this here bread was mixed, baked and what-notted for the trade. Our charmin' guide must have come from a family of auctioneers and circus barkers and he never heard of no sums under ten or eleven thousand in his life. He knowed more about figures than Joe Grady, who once filled in a summer with a Russian ballet, and he had been wound up and set to deliver chatter at the rate of three words a second, provided the track was fast and he got off in front. He talked with his whole body, waggin' his head, movin' his arms and shufflin' his feet. When he got warmed up and goin' good, he pushed forward at you with his hands like he was tryin' to insert his chatter right into you.

He leads us to a spot about half a mile from where we come in, holds up his hands to Heaven, coughs, blows his nose and gives a little shiver.

"Over there!" he bellers, without no warnin'. "Over there is our marvelous, mastadon, mixin' shop. We use 284,651 pounds of scrupulously sifted and freshly flavored flour, one million cakes of elegant yeast and 156,390 pounds of bakin' powder each and every year! We employ 865 magnificent men there and they get munificent money. We don't permit the use of drugs, alcoholics, tobacco or unions! The men works eight easy hours a delightful day, six days a week and they are happy, hardy and healthy! Promotion is regular, rapid and regardless! Our employees is all loyal, likable and Lithuanians! They own their own cottages, clothes and chickens, bein' thrifty, temperate and – "

"Tasty!" I yells. I couldn't, keep it in no longer!

"What?" snaps the little guy, kinda sore.

"Lay off, Stupid!" says the Kid to me, with a openly admirin' glance at the runt. "Go on with your story," he nods to him. "Never mind Senseless, here, I'm gettin' every word of it!"

The little hick glares at me and points to a shack on the left.

"Over there," he pipes. "Over there is our shippin' plant where the freshly finished and amazingly appetizin' loaves are carefully counted and accurately assembled! For this painstakin' performance we employ 523 more men. None but the skilled, superior and – and – eh – Scandinavian are allowed in that diligent department, and each and every day a grand, glorious total of ten thousand lovely loaves is let loose with nothin' missin' but the consumer's contented cackle as he eagerly eats! We even garnish each loaf with a generous gob of Gazoopis – our own ingenuous invention – before they finally flitter forth! Would you like to see the shop?"

"I certainly wish I could sling chatter like that!" answers the Kid with a sigh. "But I guess it's all in the way a guy was brung up. Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" he mutters, turnin' the words over in his mouth like they was sweet morsels. "Gobs of generous Gazoopis! Oh, boy!"

The little guy throws out his chest and bows with a "I-thank-you" look all over his face. He got me sore just watchin' him. Y'know that runt hated himself!

"Say!" I says to him. "If all that stuff you claim for this roll foundry is on the level, it must take a lot of dough to run it, eh?"

"Are you tryin' to kid me?" he sneers.

"No!" I comes back. "But speakin' of bakeries, I'd sacrifice my sacred silk socks for a flash at them skilled Scandinavians assemblin' that bread, before I move on to nasty New York!"

The Kid slaps me on the back and grins.

"Go on, Foolish!" he says. "You got this bird on the ropes!" He turns to the runt. "All I want," he goes on, "is one peep at them likable Lithuanians – can I git that?"

"You guys is as funny as pneumonia to me!" snorts the little guy, gettin' red in the face. "That stuff may pass for comedy in Yonkers or wherever you hicks blowed in from, but it don't git no laugh outa me! D'ye wanna see this shop or don't you – yes or no?"

"Let's go!" I tells him. "You got me all worked up about it!"

"Same here!" says the Kid. "I only wish I could talk like you can, but I guess it's a gift, ain't it?"

The little guy grunts somethin' and nods for us to fall in behind him, and we lock step along till we come to another joint from which was issuin' what I'll lay eight to five was all the noise in the world. How they ever gathered it up and got it in the buildin' I don't know, but I do know it was there! If you'd take a bowlin' alley on Turnverein night, a boiler factory workin' on a rush order and the battle of Gettysburg, wind 'em up and set 'em all off at once, you might get a faint idea of how the inmates of that buildin' was ruinin' the peace and quiet of the surroundin' country. A dynamite explosion in the next block would have attracted as much attention as a whisper in a steamfittin' shop.

"I thought the war was all over!" hollers the Kid, holdin' his ears. "Has the police been tipped off about this?"