Midnight 0102 August 26 1922
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My Daughter's Blighted Romance with Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney MIDNI GHT August 26 ~~, i Macfadden Publication 1922 There Are Glands That Make You Happy! REX BEACH On reform and i reformers \ a -) Fs 4 | $500 For the most a” thrilling Midnight * | adventures C> “Burroughs ontaine |
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This competition is open to every- one, except em- ployees of MID- NIGHT and their families. In the event of a tie for any of the prizes, each tying contestant will re- ceive the full amount of the prize tied for. Literary excel- lence will not be afactor. Only the merit of the ad- venture from the standpoint of its being thrilling is all that counts. The prize win- ning adventures will: all be pub- lished in . MID- NIGHT, and those we publish which $250.00 for the best adventure. $100.00 for the next best adventure. $ 50.00 for the third best adventure. 00 $500. adventures! MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS Volume I Number 2 Why Nice Girls Like to See Prize Fights - - - - - - - =o 76 The Queen of New York’s Moulin Rouge Tells Her Life Story- - 25 ADVENTURE Perils of the Chicago Loop- - - - - Pe ee) So es os mG The First Time I Ever Saw a Nude Woman MYSTERY Charged With His Own Murder - - - - - - - - - - - 20 FEATURES The Pace That Kills, by Bernarr Macfadden - - - - - - - 3 My Daughter’s Blighted Romance with Cornelius Whitney - -4and5 There Are Glands That Make You Happy - - - - - - - - 8 Passing Through Hel - - - - - - - el ait aes iD) How Much of Her Past Should a Wife Tell? - - - - - - - 10 How Much of His Past Should a Husband Tell? - - - - - - Il Damn the Reformers! - - - - - - - - - - ---- 12 I Never Look Back - - - - - - - - oi a oo ee enh Did Audrey Munson Take Poison Because of Me? - - - - - 15 Who Has the Prettiest Back in America?—Pictorial Feature 16 and 17 The Crisis in Modesty - - - - - - - - - - = - - - 18 The Little Laughing Thing - - - - - -~ - - - - - - - 19 Thirty Years in Tin Pan Alley- - - - - - - - - - Pu pusted weekly by the MIDNIGHT LUBLISEING COMP. Street, New York, BB Y., and 166 North Boulevard, “Chicago? t Tl. Edwin’ E. President, i Secre' 65 yee le for ate as ‘second-class matter Ai ust acne H a omtice v4 New York, N. Y., under the Act of 8, 1879. "Subse ption, $5.00 a year. In Canada—single copy, 15 conte. »INC., ichigan Atkinson, for your most thrilling midnight ES, MIDNIGHT will award five hundred dollars in good, cold, hard cash for the best stories of most thrilling midnight adventures on the part of its readers. If you were ever held up at the point of a gun at midnight—if you ever found a burglar in your room— if you were ever in a wild automobile night ride—any thrilling midnight adventure of any kind is a legitimate entry in this great contest, the full details of which appear on this page. and remember that there are eighteen worth-while prizes, aggregating $500.00, anyone of which you may win. Whatever your midnight adventure, relate it in three hundred words or less to the THRILL EDITOR of MIDNIGHT and you may win one of these prizes: You may send your entries in now, $25.00 for the fourth best adventure. $10.00 for the fifth best adventure. And prizes of $5.00 each for the 13 next best adventures. do not win prizes, will be paid for at our regular rates for stories. You may send in as many stories as you like, providing each covers a dif- ferent adventure. The contest be- gins at once and will close on Octo- ber 14th, 1922. The winners will be an- nounced in the No- vember 11th issue of MIDNIGHT. Address —- your stories, or any questions about the contest, to the THRILL EDITOR, MID- NIGHT, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.
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AUGUST TWENTY SIXTH pstge2s ni) °s “Page Three Riiculevorme vi NumBerR 2 The e Pace thal Kills WILLIAMSON, = i HE fools are not all dead yet,” is a popular phrase, i It has been said that ‘there is one born every minute.”’ But the biggest of the big fools is the fellow that is tied with a ‘‘fast life.” He goes the pace. He knows the joys of life. And the poor “simp” is usually convinced that he is getting them. Maybe he is for the time being. But hell of the earthly type is not far distant for many of these’ “guys.” They try to crowd all possible delights in a single day. “Don’t put off any joys until to-morrow, if you can enjoy them to-day,” is their motto. If he has money to burn (and many of them have for a short while), away he gues, irresponsible, unrestrained, unstable. He turns night into day. Midnight is usually the time for him to really begin his frolics. His jaded appetite must usually be stim- ulated. His capacity to appreciate anything gradually wanes. As a young man, he is usually ‘“‘blasé.”’ Tired of everything. It is only when he is spurred on by excitement or liquor that he becomes animated or really alive. To such men there is no to-morrow or next year. They think in terms of to-day. Their bodies—their brains—have to stand the strain. And they break down at forty, sometimes at thirty, at times even at twenty-five. And the poor fools then have an oppor- tunity for regrets. They look back on their wasted lives. The joys they may have had are forgotten.. They can only view the wreck that they have made of what might have been a fine habitation. HE “‘fast life” is the worst possible in- vestment. It yields the least returns. In it you squander your physical capital, your health, your life. You throw these riches away as though they were worthless. And when you find yourself a bankrupt in body and mind, you realize the tragical character of your mistake. Beware of the pace that kills. It is an invitation to rheumatism, gout, paresis, and many other diseases that make life a living hell. It destroys your natural, manly instincts. It takes away the love for a wife, home and children. You sip the fleeting joys here and there and the virus of death finally gets into your blood. May God help the man who leads the fast life! He pays the price! Sometimes it is so stupendous that death itself is a relief from a hellish existence.
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“Page Four My Daughter’ Blighted en Cornelius el OTHER, Sonny wants me to marry him. M This is what Evan said to me one day keh B Tate makes in September, 1919, six months after she CLLR TA Se had met Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney ous Oriental Cos- one tume she designed at the Bal Bleu given by Mrs. William K. Vander- for her dance. bilt II, at the Ritz-Carleton. Below—Cornelius On that memorable occasion, Evan had put on a Vanderbilt Whitney, wonderfully effective Oriental dance, especially Jr., as she calls the ba 7. originated for the occasion. It was called ‘Sava- rasti, The Bride of the Sun God.” The Vanderbilt féte was given for the benefit of the disabled soldiers, and the poor child had worked so hard for days before the event that when Mrs. Vanderbilt asked her to join the party at the close of her act she was too tired to do so. We had intended leaving quietly by a side entrance and the taxi was waiting for us when some of the girls came up to Evan and begged her to stay. “Sonny Whitney is just crazy to meet you,”’ is what they said. Evan refused repeatedly to remain. She hadn’t even taken a dress to wear and had on a coat-suit, with not even a blouse under it. She declared that she couldn’t stay. But a dress was produced and she finally consented to remain. Young Whitney cocoa this in the exuber- ance of new lo ve? Is he sorry now? From that time on, Sonny was her shadow. Still, when she said to me that day, ‘Sonny Whitney wants me to marry him,” it was the first intimation I had received that the children, as they always seemed to me, were anything more than good friends and playmates. 4 I told Evan then that they were both too young to think of marriage and that they must wait until tonny was through college. They seemed to agree So this, and during the two years of their tentative engagement Sonny came and went to and from our home as freely as though he had been my own boy. And indeed, he was like a dear son to me. He always kissed me “hello” and “goodbye’”’ and was so thoughtful of me and so respectful that I never dreamed him capable of taking advantage of my hospitality. Where I was raised such a thing would be impossible. And yet I cannot find it in my heart to hold anger against Sonny, despite the fact that he has brought sorrow to my little girl. Sonny Junior is a beautiful child with much of his father’s poetic temperament, and both Evan and I feel that he is a source of joy to us in spite of all the trouble and heartaches his advent has caused. I do, however, resent—and bitterly—the idea so freely expressed in many quarters that my daughter and I should have realized that young men of the Whitney type seek stage beauties only as a diversion and not with any serious intent. My daughter is the equal of any American living. Her ancestry is far superior to that of any Vander- bilt—or of any Whitney either. None of her
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“Page Five Romance with Vanderbilt Whitne by Mrs. Florence E. Fontaine antecedents ever paddled a ferry-boat across the Hudson for a living. And neither were they useless idlers. On her father’s side Evan is a direct descendant of Patrick Henry and also of Martha Washington. One of her grandparents, Dr. Lansing Burroughs, was a noted clergyman and another one was a noted statesman, Governor Spottswood of Virginia. My father, Judge Charles Evan was one of the most highly respected citizens of the state of Virginia. I was brought up surrounded by respect and deference and manly chivalry. I never thought of warning cay daughter against the designs of gentlemen. I guarded her carefully from the men of the stage. Unsuspecting and quite unsophisticated as I was, I yet was known as ‘‘Evan’s shadow.” The usual stage door Johnny had no chance to meet her had. she been so inclined. But she was not. She worked too hard, took her career too seriously to have any time for the frivolities so freely attributed to stage people. When we met Sonny Whitney I felt a sense of security and relief. I said to myself, “He is a nice boy and has been well brought up.” The fact that he was a Vanderbilt or a Whitney meant nothing to me except that I anticipated the noblesse oblige that our Southern code teaches us is inseparable from social responsibility and culture. My life had not been spent under the august shadow of Fifth Avenue, and the sacred privileges of its mighty Four Hundred meant nothing to me. Vaguely, of course, I had heard of Vanderbilts and other wealthy New York families, but incredible though it may seem to people whose lives are bounded by Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, it never occurred to me to feel any sense of their unapproachableness. If I thought about it at all, it was to be thankful that Evan’s friends were her social equals. I was less watchful of possible danger too, because I felt responsible for the experience that had come into Evan’s life before she met Sonny. ‘It was during the war, when everybody was more or less carried away by emotion, that we met Sterling Adair. Young Adair was a member of a well-known and highly-respected Southern family. He had joined the U. S. Naval forces and was going over to France. He and Evan saw each other only a few times, but the fact that he was from Texas and that he was going to the war combined to influence me. I let him persuade Evan to marry him before he sailed. After the ceremony we went to the Claridge for a wedding breakfast. Young Adair drank too much wine and finally blurted out: “I hope this marriage will turn out better than my other one did.” Aghast I questioned him and learned that two years previously he had contracted a runaway marriage, which his parents had succeeded in having annulled. He had not told us of this because he feared that Evan would not marry him if he had confessed. I took Evan away immediately and would not permit her to see him again before he sailed. I told her that a man who would thus deceive her before marriage, was not to be trusted and she could never be happy with him. He also showed a weakness for drink, and altogether I came to my senses and persuaded Evan it was best for her not to live with him. She never did. I tried to have the marriage annulled, but could not do so. Later, however, she secured a divorce on the grounds of misrepresentation. I tried to cheer Evan’s depressed spirits after this, by encouraging her to go out more to enjoy life. Tre child worked too hard. She originates all her dances, designs her own costumes and stage.settings, and personally directs her productions. When she was with the Denishawn dancers she did as many as seven dances each perforthance. When she was starred in the Ziegfield Follies she put on ten or more dances a night. ~ The act in which she starred in vaudeville, an Oriental legend, was written and the entire produc- tion designed and directed by herself. Much of the accompanying music was hers also. I am very proud of my daughter. She is wonderfully talented and has worked very hard indeed. Think of it! She has earned an average of $300 a week since she was sixteen years of age. Her salary now is in the thousands a week, and she is only twenty-three. Sometimes I can’t help believing in reincarnation and in Fate. The idea seems to explain many things that otherwise would be inexplicable, or so it seems tome. Evan has no stage tradition back of her—no stage atmosphere. I never had been back of the scenes until my little girl went on the stage. After our income failed us—when Evan was nine years old—I gave recitals interpreting Shakespeare’s plays and I taught elocution, but that was because I really had no business training of any kind and could only use my education advantageously in some such way. But Evan seems to have been born dancing. She danced at every charitable féte held in Dallas, Texas, where we lived when she was a child, from the time she was three years old. She never “learned steps’—she just simply danced, improvising. her own steps and generally much of her own music, When I think of how she has worked and how she has given up everything that most young girls enjoy—social life and college and all that—I con- trast her character with that of the man who has caused her such deep sorrow, and I feel that she is too good for him. I resent, not only for my own daughter but for every other woman’s daughter, who works as hard as she must if she succeeds on the stage, the careless inference that girls of the stage are legitimate prey for the young bloods who are expected to ‘‘sow their wild oats.”’ T exact nothing for my daughter that I would not as freely concede from. my son, were the situation reversed. Evan has said to me repeatedly. ‘Let it all go mother. I don’t want to marry a man who is so weak as to be brow-beaten by his parents. And I don’t need his money. If he isn’t man enough to ‘provide for his son, at least I can work and support our boy.” But I ask every mother of a daughter who has bravely faced the world and made a place for herself if she ecule not demand justice for her child in such a case Why should the girl bear alone the burden of an indiscretion that should at least be shared equally with the man? I never suspected anything was wrong between Evan and Sonny until I overheard a telephone con- versation between them and found Evan in tears. Then I made her confess. She told me that she was in trouble and that Sonny was afraid of his parents and dared not come to her. Even then I felt that the boy would find a way to do what was right. He seemed to be madly in love with Evan and often talked to me about marry- ing her as soon as he got through college. I had implicit faith in him and I comforted Evan as best I could with that assurance. So we waited and hoped. Under one pretext or another Sonny broke every promise that he made. At length becoming desperate, I appealed to Mrs. Whitney as one mother to another. I told her of my daughter’s condition. I asked her to see that justice was done to the child that was to be born. I received no reply. But yes, I did receive an indirect reply. I learned almost immediately that Sonny had been whisked off to Alaska for an indefinite stay and there began a series of persecutions and a system of espionage and cleverly laid traps, that must have cost the Whitneys much more money than would be necessary to main- tain their grandson; Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Jr., our “Sonny Junior,” for many years. Attempts have also been made to kidnap the boy, whether by his father’s family or not, I cannot say. But I can say this: There is not money enough in the world to tempt us to part with him. And I feel that I would be doing the baby an unforgivable injustice were I to be satisfied with anything less than an acknowl- edgment of his parental rights.
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Page Six WHY NICE GIRLS LIKE TO PRIZEFIG Benny Leonard, the light-weight champion and fight. The editors of MIDNIGHT have asked me to tell why. Because none among the many, many thousands who will read this can possibly guess my identity, I shall answer frankly and fully. I attend prize-fights because, at the ring-side, I get a sex thrill that is irre- sistible. To me, sitting with finger nails biting into my palms as close to the ring as I possibl can get a seat, the boxers are not aid professionals supine in sport. They are MEN fighting for ME. To my imagination I, myself, am the prize for which they battle and bleed. I am always partisan— violently, savagely so, One I want to win—Me— the other I want to lose—ME. If my favorite does win I am happy, ecstatic, thrilled indescribably with joy. If the wrong man wins, I feel as I imagine women must have felt in the Cave Age when the unwelcome lover triumphed over the chosen one. And either way I enjoy or endure an intensity of emotion that I see reflected upon every girl’s face about me. They may not be as frank as I—not even to themselves. But I know. They feel, as I do, that they are the prize for which the men in the ring are fighting, That is the reason that pretty lips are bitten until they bleed. That is the reason that well-manicured nails are torn tuthlessly to the quick. Women are always women first. How well I remember the first fight I ever saw! I had been in New York six months. I am a girl from Indiana, un- married, who holds a rather important position in an advertising agency. I was was lonely, The masculine company offered me by the Biggest City was dis- appointing, though it ranged from young, underpaid clerks to old, over-fed million- aires. I wasn’t interested in either. I didn’t need them. I didn’t want them. They all bored me. And yet I did want something. Frankly, I didn’t know myself what it was. I only knew that life was. | AM a girl, and I seldom, if ever, miss a prize- Ruth Roland seems to enjoy Jack Dempsey’s company on this California beach. EDITOR’S NOTE A few years ago a girl ata prize fight was an oddity whose appearance at the ringside was greeted by thousands of curious, ogling, mas- culine eyes. Today, particularly in New York, shop-girls and debutantes whose names loom importantly in the social register rub elbows with the women'‘of each intervening feminine caste at every boxing match. Why? What appeal has boxing to a woman? Do they go, as men do, for love of the sport as a sport? Or is it that hidden in the breast of the woman of today there lurks something of the savagery and blood-lust of the Caveman Age? To solve this question the editors of this magazine asked a girl who confesses she is a constant spectator at prize-fights to tell us why she goes, to tell what she feels and sees at the ringside to lure and intrigue her. Her story, written under the protecting mantle of anonymity, is a frank, sincere and strangely interesting human document. degenerating into a hum-drum, day-to-day exist- ence, without a high light anywhere. Subconsciously I fretted at the limitations upon freedom imposed by my girlhood. I wasn’t unhappy, but Discs discontented. Among my acquaintances is the advertising manager of a nationally-known magazine which does a vast amount of business with my employers. Several times he had invited me to dine with him but always I had refused. On the morning of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight he dropped into our office to receive our confirmation of a more than sizable contract. None of the executives were there. With our business out of the way he looked at me ques- tioningly. “T have a couple of ringside seats for the fight. The friend I intended to take has-just wired from Buffalo that he won’t be here,’’ my magazine friend suggested, “I am wondering if you would care to go with me,” “To a prize-fight! A girl!” T exclaimed. SEE Lew Tendler, who tried to wrest his laurels “My dear, there will be thousands of girls there,” he answered. ‘(Boxing matches like cigarettes are an accepted portion of every girl’s life now-a-days.” Some innate impulse prompted me to accept the invitation. After luncheon I went with him in a taxi to Boyle’s Thirty Acres. Our seats were in the very front row, so close to the ring that I could have tossed my powder puff in with the flick of a finger. At first I wasn’t particularly interested. The heavy- jowled performers in the preliminaries scarcely captured my attention and I shuddered at my first sight of prize-ring blood. But this was before Dempsey and Carpentier appeared. The moment I saw the French challenger my pulse quickened. From the moment he tossed aside his concealing bathrobe and stood out before me in the lithe, white, slenderness of his perfect physique I knew that more than anything else in the world I wanted him to win from the swarthy, heavy-muscled champion, “‘He’s magnificent,” I exclaimed to ‘my escort. puemieey: Of course he is. champion of champions.” “No. No! I mean Carpentier,” I cried. “Will he win?” He’s a “Not a chance, kid!” my _ escort answered. “He will. He must.” I cried. A bell clanged and they began to fight. I leaned forward in my chair, watching, as if the future of my Host, and soul were at stake; as if each of the blows struck were struck for or against me personally. The vast sea of faces rising tier on tier around the circumference of the arena no longer existed for me. I was a girl—alone— and before my eyes two men fought for me. One, if he were victor, I could and would hate; the other, if he won, I could love. How fiercely I prayed the right man would win! Long before the tap of the bell ended the first round the tingling flow of each drop of blood in my veins told me why women go to prize-fights. They go because at the ring-side, Beaut captures a new sensation—one that is denied her in this present-day world in (Continued on page 31)
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Perils Chica¢ NDLESSLY the elevated trains run around the Loop. That is why it bears the name. Once the apy of Chicago thought they had solved all their transportation problems. With a mighty celebration the LOOP came into g. Just a steel structure, with rails atop of it and cars to run on them. Then the people woke up and found that they still had their problems. In addition, they had—the LOOP. Eight blocks long and five blocks wide, is the Loop. The trains come in from the South, from the North and from the West. Each one rhythmically rumbles its way around. Business meets Art inside the Loop. Tears mingle with laughter. Great hotels stand beside vast business structures. Millions are made. Mil- lions lost. .Hearts ache. Men die. Luxury flaunts her fine garments in the face of Poverty. Tired business men walk the streets wearily. Girlhood fades, with a pittance for its labor. So does boyhood. Fresh young faces from home, are painted masques within a year. Thoughts crash against thoughts. Wits war with wits. ! Vice trails with her robes of scarlet laid close around her. Story after story, the buildings tower, Office after office, row upon row. Stocks go up and stocks go down. The flicker of an eyelash and men hurl themselves from high windows. They sit in their offices and drink poison. They walk out into their big motor cars and whirl away—from the Loop. But they never forget it—the Loop. No one does who comes there each day. Youth fades into old age—to the rhythmic rumble of the elevated trains. Somewhere, dimly outside, is the land of HOME. The land where honor reigns and children dwell. Of these, the voce knows little—and cares less, Men live any lives they choose—in the Loop. No one questions. No one remembers Rome. NIGHT PUIEE never lets up in the Loop. Grey shadows creep into the. alleys. Office buildings stand stark in the electric lights. Overhead a purple sky, with one pale star broken through. Always the men and women who walk in the night look in vain for the eyes of heaven—the steady stars that fade from sight in the glare of the electricity. Tired scrub women on their knees make clean the long halls of the buildings where men live in their offices during the day. Their babies are at Chicago’s famous loop at night. Yes, there’s night life ih Chicago! home, cared for by someone else. So one state of Homeland is broken. As late as three in the morn- ing you may see the scrub women on their way home eirough the dusky cafion that is La Salle Street at night. On Madison Street and on State the lights never go out at night. Only when the great King of the ay comes up out of the blue lake on the east of the town are the currents turned off. The Loop is light, light, light! It is light and yet—when-the Loop is brightest and gayest, the perils of the City are deepest and most subtle. With her ball of scarlet yarn in her hand Vice walks the streets in many guises. Of young and old she takes toll and as she walks un- winds her scarlet yarn. Follow the trail of the elfin, devilish, awful thing! So that each one may follow, she lays her scarlet strand, Ambling, shambling, one knee bent half double, and the other foot turned stiffly outward, walks a beggar. The right side of his mouth droops gro- tesquely. Were the effect not so damnably pitiful, it would be ludicrous. His face is white, chalky white, with no red in his lips even. A dull scum has crept over his eyes and they reflect no glow from the street lights. With his right hand he holds out a shallow box. Tremblingly he begs you to ed “Please buy”— chewing gum. CHEWING GUM OF MANY MAKES. Lightly you toss him the price of a acket, one whole nickel. He does not thank you. e looks beyond you—at someone coming down the street. Almost, light creeps into his dull eyes. Yet his pleading to buy does not stop. Ambling, shambling, on he walks, the chewing gum peddler. Nearer comes the man the beggar has seen. Well tailored, smug, born and bred truly, by all that is evident! Why should he meet an answering gat in the dull eyes of a crippled chewing gum seller at night—in the Loop? “Hello-o-o Jim,” calls out the dapper one. His face, too, is chalky white. There is a glow in his eyes that becomes a glare in the street lights. “Here,” he remarks laconically, “Here are a few pennies: Give me all the gum you have. That’ll elp you out with another stock tomorrow. I took the pennfes in change for street car fares and I want to get rid of ‘em!” A ‘o policeman is in sight. There is little disorder in the Loop at night. It is the place where banditry “Page Seven of the o Loop... — —_ does not flourish particularly. Save in big $200,000 hauls, like that from the Masonic Temple vaults a couple of months ago. State Street at night is. safe for some sorts of traffic in human misery. With a sweep of his hand, the dapper one gathers in the chewing gum. Furtively the beggar looks about. There is no policeman in sight! He counts his pennies carefully. He throws up his chin a bit. Sharply his fingers close upon the coins as you approach. ‘New pennies!” he exclaims. ‘He bought all my stock of chewing gum. He is a kind man.” Then a miracle happens. This is no pretty fiction story but one as true as the steady star that has broken through the purple of the sky above. One of the PENNIES drops from his hand. His fingers tremble too much to hold them all! Ho! Hol! for the scarlet strand that we follow through the night—the blood red line of a Wanton March. No pennies these the chewing gum beggar holds in his shaking fingers, but coins of GOLD, almost the size of pennies. Five-dollar gold pieces. Any person wise in the ways of the Loop at night knows the riddle’s answer. DOPE! In chewing um packets. Clever scheme! Why look after the lapper young man? He is out of sight, around the corner. All you know about him is that his face is chalky white. He looks as if he has plenty of money. Moving faster, but still ambling, shambling, (Continued on page 29)
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“Page Eight There are Glands that Make You Happy It looks like a seri- ous operation! And so it is! It is a famous love-gland test. Here’s where you find ’em! Love gland tests being made at a Massachusetts Gland farm. Note the look of expectancy on the calf’s countenance. ‘OW we know that when the bad man of Terror Gulch pulled a gun on, Snaked Eyed Pete, “calculating as how no ornery greaser could call him. a liar’, and laid that im- etuous gentleman low, it was not the bad man’s ‘ault at all. He was the victim of his glands—those little happiness or trouble makers that medical science has recently discovered. You see, the bad man had an extraordinarily well- developed adrenal gland that sat across his kidney the way the bad man himself swung across his saddle. And a large adrenal spells fight with hell to pay: If it isn’t the bad man of Terror Gulch, it’s Napoleon or General Grant or Jack Dempsey. For the adrenal is the gland of combat—the gland that makes a wooly lamb walk right up to Armour and Company and snap its hoofs in their faces. The adrenal is also the gland which takes care of emergencies. It helps you to act uickly, When you come home after a hard day’s work and find that wifie’s mother has arrived for a three weeks visit, your adrenal gland, if you have an Al, XXX specimen athwart your kidney, whispers in your ear, “Take a shot at the old girl, I’m with you,” and then begins the Battle of the Adrenals. Mother-in-law usually wins because she never liked you since she laid eyes on you, and she has been polishing up her adrenal for you ever since. The Pitituary Gland is quite another department. It is the pitituary that fills you so full of energy that you swing out of your house in the morning, walk six miles to business and then tear into a hard day’s work, getting up from your desk nine hours Jater wishing you could work all night. Of course, no one really ever did feel that way, but they would if their pitituary gland was perfect. But I suppose there isn’t such a thing as a perfect itituary gland in the world. At least I never eard of one. The Pitituary is nse at the base of the brain, right behind the root of thé nose. It is about as big asa pea. For its size it is probably the most active little thing that ever got into the human anatomy. An operation on the pitituary is almost an impos- sibility. You havé to take the face apart, laying aside the ears, the nose and eyes. The teeth have to be removed, the nose gently pried loose and the pitituary caught firmly on the end of a crochet needle. Itis no trick whatever to get at the pitituary That’s easy. But to reassemble the features after- ward, giving them the semblance of reality after they are tacked, sewed and glued back on—ah, that is where skill of a high order is required. For that reason most of us will never personally meet our pitituaries and thank them for having made us so depp The best we can do is to offera silent prayer of thankfulness. occasionally. We now arrive at a consideration of the thyroid land which produces the energy so nobly utilized 5 its mate, the pitituary. This gland is in what is often jestingly and sometimes scientifically referred to as the neck. A healthy oa gland puts hair on the chest, bones in the skeleton, meat on the legs and, generally speaking, makes a ribbon counter clerk look like a man from God’s country “‘where men are men and the Great West begins.” It can turn the common brown cockroach of domestic commerce into a humming bird. As the surprised and delighted seeker eee knowledge peruses this treatise he will occasionally come across scientific information like the foregoing that is both inspiring and edifying. The pineal gland is a cone-shaped bit of tissue hidden away at the base of the brain in a tiny cave behind and above the pitituary. If it wasn’t for the pineal gland we would never grow up, and inasmuch as we can’t all be motion picture censors, most of us would have a difficult time to make a living. (Continued om page 30)
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Page Nine by John W. Grey HE story of “Pittsburg Tommy’s’” punish- ment in the Illinois State prison at Joliet, Illinois. A word picture a the barbarous and fiendish tortures that were inflicted upon him while he was feigning insanity. A vivid por- trayal of how the masters of the old prison system tried to “break” convicts who manifested the rebellious spirit; the system that doomed the rem- nants of human souls to a slow death; the system that turned men into beasts and monsters and rip- roaring maniacs! . “Old Nevada Mike’, one of the cleverest train robbers that ever crawled over the tender of a locomotive to “stick up” an engineer and make him stop his train, once told me that “the Irish make the best thieves and the best detectives in the world.” “Why is it,” I asked him, “‘that the Irish excel in these lines’ ?’ “I don’t know,” he replied. “All I know is that they do. The best burglars and the best detectives are Irish. All the sensational escapes that have been made from prisons have been made by ‘micks’, just as all the great captures have been made by ‘micks.’ If a Jew or a Dutchman gets in prison they usually stay there, but an Irishman never gives up, he is always trying to beat the place. He'll fight as long as he can stand up.” “Old Nevada Mike” made this statement to me nearly twenty years ago when I first entered the underworld as a rosy-faced kid of eighteen, and during the years that followed I learned that there was a lot of truth in what he said, for the Irish stand out pre-eminently within the confines of the sub- merged world of crime. I have learned as a result of fifteen years experience as a bank burglar that the sons of Old Erin do, as Mike said, make the best crooks, the best detectives, and that all the sensa- tional escapes: that are made from prisons are made by “micks.”’ So this is going to be a story around the person- ality of an Irish burglar known as“PittsburgTommy” Murphy, whom the writer knew for quite a long time. The story, incidentally, will also point out the absolute folly of a life of crime with its staggering penalties, penalties that make the career of the crook a tragedy! I say this as one who has lived the life sé I know what I’m talking about. “Pittsburg Tommy” has robbed banks all over the world. He ha: operated in Russia, Germany and France, wherever the flag of civilization was flown, there Tommy went with his nitro glycerine and his wedges and his jimmies to blast open vaults and: safes. He was no respecter of persons or laces. A bank was a bank to him whether it was in South Dakota or South America. While in France he was arrested for the robbery of a bank a few miles outside of Paris. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to serve a term of twenty years on Devils Island, that God forsaken strip of boar waste off the coast of South America in French Guiana. When the underworld of New York heard about his capture and sentence to Devils Island everybody thought that Tommy would die there. The French boasted ‘‘no man ever escapes from Devils Island.” I will not burden you with details. I will only say that Tommy beat the Island. He was the first man that ever beat it. Shortly after his escape another American crook, an éighteen-karat Irish- man, Eddie Guerin by name, also beat it. It seems that “Old Nevada Mike” was right when he said that “all the sensational escapes from prisons are made by the micks.”’ Before Tommy was sent to the Joliet prison there was nothing hard or tough about him; he was an easy going, Siena nerd soft-spoken cracksman, who would go a hundred miles out of his way to dodge a fight. “T don’t like fighting,” he once said to me, “it’s too damn hard on the eyes.” But Joliet changed him. It turned him into a wild man. He was hard when he got out of Joliet, hard as they make them, a human rattlesnake! After you read this story you will understand! In the latter part of the year of 1901 Tommy was arrested in Chicago for the robbery of a bank in Southern Illinois. I know, as a matter of fact, that he was absolutely innocent, that he didn’t have a thing to do with the job for which he was subse- quently convicted. I know that he was innocent for the very good reason that I, myself, robbed the bank with my own gang. The writer happened to be in Joliet when Tommy came in to serve a twenty-five- year sentence, so that anything I may say about his experiences in that place will be facts, cold blooded facts minus romance and embellishment. I volunteered to make a confession exonerating him of having been a participant in the robbery for which he had been convicted but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Forget it,” he told me, “I’l beat this dump some way orother. I’m not going to stick around here for twenty-five years, that’s too long to stay in one place, believe me.” In those days Joliet had the reputation of being one of the worst prisons in the United States, Its reputation as a ‘chamber of horrors’ was country- wide. Many a crook went in that never came out; it was a hundred per cent. worse than the San Quen- tin prison in California ever dared to be, and God knows that San Quentin murdered many a convict with .its barbaric tortures. Nobody had ever got away from Jolieh, Everybody said it was ‘unbeatable. Many had tried, but they all had failed, so when Tommy told me that he was going to beat it, I had to smile. ‘How are you going to do it?” “Tm going to play bugs,’’ he replied. “You'll never get away with the crazy man stunt here, Tommy.” “Well, I’m going to try it, anyway.” His eyes flashed fire when he said that, de- termination was written all over his chubby Irish face. I tried to persuade him that it was a hopeless, discouraging proposition and that he shouldn’t entertain such an idea for a minute. “They'll beat you to death,” I protested, “you'll never be able to stand the torturing that they'll put you through. Take a chance on a getaway, for- get about feigning insanity for they'll tear the heart assing through Hell! out of you just as soon as you start that rackei Tommy.” ; “T’ll take a chance,” he snapped, “‘I’d rather be dead than do a twenty-five-year bit in this dump. If I can hold out under the punishment and get them to send me to the criminal insane asylum at Bloomington it will be dead easy for me ‘to beat that.” “Forget it,” I pleaded, ‘they'll kill you sure as. you’re alive, this warden is a brute, he’ll beat you to death.” “J start to-morrow,” he answered, “and if I don’t Watch me.” stick it out I’ll eat your shirt. So the next day Tommy started to feign insanity. He didn’t go out to the shop when the guards un- locked the cells and when one of them went up to his cell to find out why he hadn’t gone out to the (Continued from page 23)
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Page Fen In the first place it is bound to be one- V sided, with the chances all banked against the woman. “Confession” for a man, is at best nothing more than an admission. At its worst it becomes 4 boast. The average man registers somewhere between the two extremes. Most men are average—and the “averag-er” they are, the more they demand of the woman they marry. No matter how advanced he may be in other respects, the average man assumes a proprietary interest in his wife’s past, from her exit from the cradle to her entrance at the altar. Women to-day are flattering themselves that the have become emancipated—even individualized. In proof of this delusion they are rushing madly in where angels would don rubber-soled “sneakers” before venturing. Women have “fallen” for the confessional almost as a unit because it seems to them so great an advance over the old-time assump- tion of complete and total ignorance of sex. Only the “Safety-First’” admonition prevents them from starting right in on the ‘““Now I’ve some- thing I must confess to you, Dear,” even before the hymenial knot is securely tied. Let me tell you! That ‘Tell-your-husband- everything line of advice is nothing more or less than an old trap, re-vamped and camouflaged. Once your unwary feet have been caught in it, you will wake up to find yourself at least a half-sister, if not a twin, to the woman of ancient days whose bride- groom was privileged to stone her to death in the event of her failure to satisfy him of her absolute virginity. know that the prevailing idea is that there can be no happiness in marriage where there is not com- plete mutual confidence. Also it is considered to be axiomatic that there can be no confidence where there is not mutual confession of every thought, word and deed that has been, is, or ever will be incubated within thé minds of each of the lovers. _. That old “You belong to me and I belong to you” idea is still one of the tenets of the unhappily married. People seem to overlook one very perti- Nent little point in this “confidence game.” It is this: Actual, perfect, mutual confidence would preclude the need of the confession stunt. I fancy I hear some one say, ‘Surely you don’t think two persons who love each other should have secrets from each other—sort of skeletons in the closet, do you?” I have-heard that argument many times and I always fail to see the connection. Secrets? Skele- tons? Why should a person’s past be regarded in the light of secrets or skeletons? That is another silly notion that is gaining on us. It should be nipped ‘i’ the bud.” It is another snare for the “emotional feminine.” : Of course if a woman derives any especial relief or excitement or joy or benefit of any kind from a recital of her love affairs, she should be privileged to recount them. Men seem to get all of these emotions from reminiscing and maybe some day women will also—but the time is not yet, and I doubt if it ever will be. As yet it is done, when done, in a spirit of dutiful obligation to the male. It is penance. There still exists the idea that fe must not be cheated; he is the one to forgive or not to forgive. No woman with the amount of intelligence she must have if she hopes to make a success of mar- riage should think of regaling her husband—actual or prospective—with a detailed history of her past. IEWED from any angle, the marital confes- sion—whether “‘pre’’ or “post” is a mistake. f Tley Past Confession is said to be good for the soul. Here’s a lady who says that a woman’s soul doesn’t need such a stimulant. You can tell from the way she writes that she means what she says!’ It would be just as appropriate to recount her struggles with the multiplication table. I am not taxing the stand that what a woman has been, or what a man has been for the matter of that, is no concern of the present incumbent in her or his affections, although that too has its “evidential value’ as the law vendors would say. What I mean is something quite different. I mean that anything savoring of the defiant attitude, that, “it’s none of your business’’ stuff, registers self-accusation. So, too, does the ‘“‘mutual confidence”’ stunt. A French writer—I think it is Martinean—says in substance: “To excuse yourself is to accuse ourself.” The ‘telling-your-husband-everything” abit, when it is not actually dangerous because it is self-accusation than which nothing could be worse, is silly. No man can retain a passionate admiration for a silly woman. He may tolerate her, but passion to be enduring must have a source. A shallow mind is like a shallow brook—it ultimately runs dry. In a battle for a man’s passionate adoration, intelligence will always win over beauty. All the ‘“vamps” of history have been women of brains and temperament—not merely beauty and temper. But to go back to my fundamental objection to the matrimonial confessional; When two persons marry it is presumably because they find in each other those traits of character that each admires. At least they find in each other that element of sex-attraction that is more lasting or more thrilling than they have hitherto found! No matter which it is, the fact remains that they suit each other—or think they do. Now what has made those two persons just what they are? Is it not their experiences? Experiences, and especially emotional experiences are the text-books of our real education. School education when it is not mere brain-fagging is not more than brain- training, so that when the real business of lifé is taken up, the brain responds to the stimulus of Thought. So with the emotional nature, especially when plussed by a trained brain; the experiences one encounters train the character, develop the indi- viduality—make or mar the man or woman. Why then should either one go over the Past, excusing or condoning or recriminating, as the case may be—the very things that have brought about the development the other admires? It is stupid! It gives an overvaluation to the text-books and not enough to the results. Besides, there is another point of view that I consider an important one, At first thought it may seem unworthy, but think it over. You'll find that it contains the seed of marital happiness. I think I can best illustrate what I mean by telling you a story. It is a true story, and an illuminating one. I was going through that kindergarten stage of emancipation where a woman feels the call to “tell- her-husband-everything,” when I married my husband—my first husband. O, yes, I’ve been married twice. I’ve learned about men from matrimony. I was one of those girls who claimed—rather boisterously I fear—self-justification. I was one of the early crop and you know how seriously women took their freedom at first. We are not so serious how. To do him justice my husband did not want to listen. He told me that my past meant nothing to him; that he was only concerned with my present and future; that to him I was the most wonderful ‘woman in the world, and that how I became the wonderful woman I was did not interest him any more than what I had fed on to build my beautiful body. He protested that he had no mind for de- tailed specifications, being concerned only with the finished product. All this he said and more. But I was suffering from an ingrowing conscience which I mistook for a principle of emancipation and I insisted on makin; a clean breast of everything. (I think I shoul rather say that I insisted upon making a nasty mess of everything.) I told him about my first sweetheart. That con- fession was something which I now realize I had no moral right to lay bare. It should have been sacred between my lover and me. We were madly in love with each other. He was poor. I was useless. I had not been brought tad any kind of work. I knew no way to Belg im financially. We could not marry. He died. I had never been able to feel any sense of shame or wrong-doing about that experience— until I told it. I have never forgiven myself for that desecration of what befo:e was a sweet memory. I had in the meantime gone to work. I had obtained a very good poster in a city some dis- tance from my home. I was one of the high-salaried ad-writers in an influential firm. But I was-very lonely. Other girls had men friends but for some reason I could never retain a man friend—he always wanted to be something more. They always declared that other girls were not so prudish. I did not know; that did not influence me anyway.
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oe 11/0/0117 poe sensations, she told her husband-to-be everything. Coquelin and Mounct-Sully were discussing the affair. “What superb courage!”’ Coqueiin exclaimed. “No,” Mounet-Sully retorted. “What a marvel- ous memory!” History—capricious creature—is silent as to what hubby told the divine Sarah. If, indeed, he told her anything. Perhaps he didn’t have the chance. Many men who have the pertics for confession before dipping into the troubled sea of matrimony follow the example of one of Corra Harris’s heroes and make confession—with discreet reservations. This was the plan adopted by Lord Lytton. “Ts that all?” remarked the future Lady Lytton coldly, when her spouse had ended his grim recital. “On my honor that is all,” the novelist protested. “Indeed?” remarked the lady cynically. “What about your affair with our cook a week ago?” Before marriage, in former days, men knew everything and women nothing. Now women know everything and men are slow to learn, “Did you tell your fiancee everything?” asked one brother of another. “T started to,’ was the rueful admission. ‘But she interrupted and opened my eves by telling me a few things.” This woman must have had a fellow feeling for the clever and sophisticated French countess who, when asked if she told her husband everything, replied with charming candor: “Certainly not! Husbands are stupid, That is a lover’s privilege.”’ Should a man confess his peccadilloes to the woman who has marked him for her own? Why bless your heart you can’t keep them from it! The lure of the confessional, whether sanctified by the church or canonized by human nature, is strong within us all. Even Jacques Casanova, author of the famous “Love Adventures,” was obsessed with it. When engaged to be married, he not only told his fiancee of his numerous “‘affairs,”” buf even showed her a collec- tion of pictures of his conquests, many of them in Mother Eve costume before the fig leaf became famous. His comment on this interesting episode was, “She was interested but not shocked.” The epigram of courtship too often becomes the epitaph of matrimony. We do not need less but more confession. Many a man whose mouth is a bubbling geyser before marriage puts the clam to shame after marriage. Disillusion is a dreadful thing. Men should look before marriage and over- look afterit. And with styles as they are at present, every look is a revelation. A man may stammer, he may have a hair-lip, a pug nose, cross-eyes and carroty locks, but the girl of his choice will consider him a combination of Wallace Reid for beauty, Richard Barthelmess for charm, and Roscoe Arbuckle for deviltry. She wonders, with a thrill, why, among all the women of the world, he chose her to be queen of his heart and empress of his gas-range. When the girl of his choice clasps her hands tragically over her heart and demands that he bare the hideous secrets of his sad and sinful past, what is a poor grocer’s clerk to do? He has never done worse than pilfer a few pennies or wink at a pretty EFORE Bernhardt married—she did marry B finally—she was always a glutton for new “Page Gleven Thinking thoughts that he wants to tell his wife. But dare a husband confess his past? That's the question anawered on this page by one who says . . . .but read for yourself. girl in the dark. Shall he disappoint his adoring bride? Not while imagination remains! He outdoes Othello in the fairy tales he spins while his Des- demona sits wide-eyed, horror-stricken at the depravity of men! It thrills her to know that a Knight of Such Delectable Adventure should have succumbed to her humble charms, ‘ Unless a man unbosoms himself of ALL—discreet reservations, of course—how is the reforming instinct of womanhood to find full play? He can solemnly promise to quit cigarettes, of course. Which means that he will be deprived of his ‘“‘coffin nail” in her presence or in the presence of friends who will carry the news to her. But merely stopping cigarettes will not satisfy the ordinary woman. He must bare the hideous past (and he always comes up to expectations) so that she can thoroughly, consistently, persistently and insistently reform him. Even with the aid of the liveliest imagination a man’s past often appears pale, drab and drear as compared to the hectic and purple past of the woman of his choice. “I have bared my entire life to you,” dramatically exclaimed Count La Firre. “Will you do the same?” “Certainly not,” replied the fair and, if report spoke truly, frail Countess de Neulle, “I haven’t time. A fortune teller prophesied that I should never live beyond ninety.” 4 w Much of His Past In mutual confession, the race is not always to the one with the greatest experience or most vivid imagination. It is a wise man who keeps silence and allows certain discreet innuendos or insinuations to do their pa:t. “My husband was a terrible man,” boasted one woman at her club. “From certain remarks he has dropped from time to time I know his past weighs heavily on his conscience.” She was in the same boat as the woman who remarked proudly to her husband’s chum: “I know my husband like a book.” “Indeed?” replied the other politely. He was aware of certain purple interludes of which the lady in question knew nothing. ‘Are you sure you have turned all the pages?” It is awkward when a man feels called upon to confess and has no deep, dark past and no imagina- tion to conjure or invent one. A young man started the usual mental house- cleaning while the light of his life leaned forward expectantly, lips tense, eyes eager and pulse running riot. As his task proceeded her face grew colder and colder. Something was wrong! Suddenly she leaped forward and asked frigidly if what he told her was true. “Yes, darling. I know it is awful of me. But that was long before I came under your refining ane ennobling influence. Won’t you please forgive me?’ “Strange,” she remarked—and the temperature was-now below zero, “I thought you were a young man. I read that story in the Decameron. I did not know you were so old. Here is your ring! I have the pleasure of bidding you good-night—and you need not take the trouble to call again.” Just how much should a husband tell his wife? I can answer that in one word: everything. To this every normal woman and most men will give a hearty assent. ‘How much do you tell your wife?” a man was asked, ‘Oh, just enough to lull her sus- picions,”’ was the cynical rejoinder. That is the wrong attitude. Unless there is perfect love and trust in married life, marriage is a failure. Only where there is perfect love and trust ae man and wife is perfect happiness to be ound, _, The average woman will forgive a man anything if he will only tell her occasionally that she does not look a day older than when they first met. Why won’t a married man. ! treat his wife as well as he treats his mistress? Next week’s Midnight gives ' the answer. ae
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“Page Jwelve Rex Beach Says Damn the but I’m afraid it is too late. The business isn’t as sound or as wholesome as it was a year or two ago and neither are the pictures themselves. The business is sick and the product is sickly. And it is getting worse. That is only natural for it has too many doctors; too many patent medicine quacks, each one with his own remedy. It is being dosed to death, I maintain, to begin with, that the patient is a full grown adult and if we’re going to cure him he shouldn’t be fed on soothing syrup. Give him a physic, slap him on the back and send him out into the open air. He'll get well himself if people will quit monkeying with him. But people love to monkey. We live in a meddlesome age; meddling is a regular profession. People used to meddle for nothing, now they’re paid for it. Nothing is right, unless it suits us individually. The other fellow is all wrong unless he agrees with us. We are no longer content to live our own lives, we must also live other people’s lives for them. i e are not content to let the motion picture be what it is, a great medium of entertainment; we must make it into something else, into a “iets device, into a child’s plaything, into a night schoo! for illiterate foreigners. I’m going to talk as an author and give you an author’s opinion of the business, Everybody says give us better stories, get the men and women of recognized creative ability to write for the screen and we'll have better pictures. That is the bunk. You don’t want men and women of creative ability, and you won’t let them write for the screen when you get them. You don’t want better, bigger, stronger, more vigorous stories. What you want and what you insist upon Beving is mush and slush, predigested pap and baby food, aay lee stories and sickly sentiment. You want the Rollo books, and scenics with titles about the punts dawn and God’s glorious wonderland. o wonder the grown-ups along Broadway fought with each other to get into the Capitol last week and see an Eskimo eat raw seal meat. It was about the first red blood they’ve seen in pictures since the screen was elevated and made safe for hypocrisy. To invite an author or a playwright to make good, strong, original pictures is like LE prisoner to the door of Sing Sing and saying, “There, my good man, re are free. Go out into the world and do something big.” It is like telling him that and then refusing to strike the ball and chain from his ankle and the handcuffs from his wrists. The author who tries to write for pictures finds his hands manacled and a ball and chain on his leg. He goes to the producers and says: “T have a great story.” The producer says: “ ‘Great?’ How do you get that way? Where’s the undressing scene?. We have to undress our stars or the public won’t take them. Cut the story to fit Gloria Swanson, or Mae Murray, or Wally Reid, or Jackie Coogan, and we'll buy it. Royalty? You want royalty, and business as rotten as it is? You guys are crazy. How can I pay royalty to an author when I’ve got actors on steady pay, and when the gees seven thousand dollars a week? How much will you take? Wait! Don’t tell me. My top price is three thousand. I wouldn’t pay Shakespeare more than four.’ I’ll give ‘ou five. It took you six months to write it, eh? ell, that’s ten thousand a year. In fifty years ‘ow’ll make five-hundred thousand dollars. It’s a lot of money. T wish I had it.” Suppose the author undertakes to produce his own pictures. He goes to his bank to borrow some money and it is explained to him that banks never tie up their funds in anything so speculative as motion pictures, but they send him to the ninth vice- president. The ninth vice-president arranges to secure the money, or a part of it. All he asks is a l THINK it is about time something was done, / Re BEACH is one of America's greatest novelists. He is unuttrably opposed to the wave of stupid puritanism that is sweeping our country. On this page he sums up his belief in a bigger, finer, cleaner appreciation of art than the censors are aware of. He gives us all something to tie to as to whether our instruction and our entertainment shall be subject to a narrow and unwarranted censorship. MIDNIGHT is glad to publish this clean- thinking, hard-hitting public man’s views on a question in which every American, is interested, We shall be glad to have your opinion on the subject Mr. Beach covers so skillfully. bonus of twenty per cent., money back with interest out of the first receipts, and a share of the profits. It figures out just like the banking deals that Frank and Jesse James used to pull off. The bank puts u the money and the ninth vice-president and his pals divide the profits. - A ht. Suppose the deal goes through and the production starts. The exhibitor says make the icture strong, put in some excitement, some fight- ing, some love and sex. Give us red meat. That’s what our audiences want. The author does so and the censors cut out all but the title, the license number and the slow fade at the end. No vice, no crime, no fighting, no sex, no baby’s clothes. It isn’t safe for the children, and it excites our illiterate foreigners. Your exhibitor wants pictures for adults, your censors insist upon pictures for prattling children and mental defectives. j iad D summer I madea picture. It wasa story of railroad building, a romance of big business. It had lots of scenery and a clean, ope love story. No bedroom -scenes, no cabarets. The exhibitors Reformers! said, “Yeah! It’s good enough. The production is fine, the cast is splendid, the continuity is all right, but there isn’t eougs love init. There isn’t enough man and woman. Our audiences want that. They won’t come to see anything else. Give us more romance.” So I made another picture, all romance. The exhibitors said, ‘Fine' Atta Boy! Here’s a clean up,” and the Cens rs said, “All that stuff is out.” Over in Philadelphia, the Board said, “Ah, a picture by Rex Beach, eh? He has had some cruel things to say about censorship. It is indeed a pleasure to view one of his pictures. Watson, the scissors.” When they got through, about all they hadn’t cut was the leading lady’s finger nails. When we argued that the New York Board passed the picture and praised it, they smiled tolerantly and said: “The New York Board is young, yet. lot to learn.” I’ve written a good many stories and none of them have beer declared injurious to the general moral welfare, in story form. But this Pennsylvania Board reviewed one of those stories in picture form and declared the whole thing unclean, immoral and improper. I ruined the youth of Youngstown and contaminated the Philadelphia squab, etc. So much for the actual, practical workings of censorship. So long as we have forty-eight, or twenty-four, or twelve, or two separate and distinct codes of Be so long as any small body of men and women can impose upon the rest of us their own particular ideas of morality, the screen will never be a free, dignified method of artistic expression, and authors will continue to regard pictures as a by- produce of their work, ape will content themselves by getting out of them all they can while the getting is good. It has a Dy your censors concern themselves with tal taste, in pictures, orilliteracy, or poor grammar? Do they censor mere vulgarity? Do they censor senseless stories, artificial sentimentality? No. They cut a kiss to five feet. They eliminate child birth, They ban gambling, fighting—anything which in real life is contrary to law cannot be shown in the shadow drama. Did you ever stop to think how few unmutilated stories are shown in Pennsylvania? It is a wonder that eae eh people, people over sixteen years of age, go to the theatre at all. After all, censorship is nothing more or less than a household labor saving device, like the laundry machine or the electric dish washer. It is devised for the purpose of relieving the housewife of the care for the moral well-being of her child. So long as you maintain the cry that pictures must be made safe for the children you will have mawkish, futile, imbecilic pictures that will bore the adult and keep him out of the theatre. So long as you insist upon lowering the story standard of the screen to the intellectual level of the nursery you will have not a business calling for brains and initiative and artistic genius, but a welfare movement that should be turned over to settlement workers. Three years ago I had the fatuous idea that the business needed big, creative writers and afforded them a tremendous field for expression. I went to Rupert Hughes and Gouverneur Morris and Leroy Scott and Basil King and Gertrude Atherton and Mary Rinehart and got them to go into the game. They laughed at me. They detested pictures and everything about them. Finally they fell. And what happened? Rupert Hughes stuck. Due to a remarkable and unusual combination of talents, he has made good in ahs way. But the others? Where are they? They used to be close personal friends of mine. Now I walk around the block when I see them coming. ‘ (Continued on page 28)
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“Page Thirteen. The First ee Studente League. I know, for I was a member of the Evening Life Class at the League for three years, cad drew Marie’s undraped figure in hundreds of poses. Since then I have made a permanent name for myself in the world of art. at pictures hang in the great galleries of the world. ARIE BOURGET was the toast of the M Art Students’ League. x an. 3 ze : e 22.N d E ve e \ -|EONARD VHITNEY- I have drawn from hundreds of other models in the twenty years of my career, but never in all m: experience have I seen a model so divinely formed, so graceful in every movement, so able‘to interpret the artist’s conception as Marie. Often I have wondered whether my long continued regard for, and remembrance of, Marie may not be tempered by the fact that she was the first girl I ever saw undraped. a ateae I came to New York in the year 1902 from a small up-state city. Of course, I had never had a technical training in art, but I knew that all I ever wanted to do was to draw. : I copied everything I found in the magazines and the newspapers. I drew pictures of my friends from ime |Ever Sawa Woman By A Prominent Artist life. I was never without a pencil and a sketch pad in my hand, over hill and dale. My father, at last despairing that I would ever make a success at anything else, let me have my way. He gave me two hundred dollars and sent me to New York to ‘Jook around,’’ as he called it. I went first to the Art Manager of one of the bi; prese magazines of the day and had a talk wit m. He told me to beware of the many fake art schools with which the side streets of New York abounded, and advised me to apply for membership at the Art Students’ League, which I did. The class in which T began my studies was known as the Illustration Class. It was under the direction of St. John Harper, a fine, white-haired old gentle- man, greatly beloved by the students under him, I was nervous, embarrassed, and altogether diffi- dent, and perhaps I didn’t draw so well as I could have done under more favorable circumstances, But I do remember when St. John Harper took one pence at my portfolio, he threw up his hands in orror. “Great Heavens!” he cried: “You don’t know the human figure! You don’t know what is under- neath those garments! Learn the figure, my boy,” he advised me, faving his hand on my shoulder. “Herel” He dashed off a note, “Present this to Mr. Yohn in the Evening Life Class. That is where you should study for the next three or four years,” If I was embarrassed before, I was then a red, pelpitatiog mass of humanity. I could feel the eyes of the rest of the class upon me, and during the inter- mission (the evening sessions of the League are from eight to ten-thirty; the model has a five minute rest every half hour) I sneaked out. of the room with my portfolio under my arm, determined to go into some other profession and leave art for those who had a gift for it. On the way to the stairs, however, I paused and found myself opposite a closed door. Closed doors have always had a fascination for me. I can scarcely ever restrain myself from turning a door-knob because doors conceal more adventures in this life than any other barrier made by man. So, without thinking much about why I did it, I ned the knob of that door and it opened at my touch, The room was flooded with light. Students, with their portfolios laid on over-turned chairs, sat about laughing and chatting, while I stood by and wondered what class that might be. Timidly I asked the nearest fellow to me and he said, “This is the Life Class.” I asked him which gentleman was Mr. Yohn, the. instructor. The young man pointed Mr. Yohn out and I approached him with the note St. John Harper had just given me. He gave mea cursory glance, nodded and said, ‘Very well, find yourself a place.” I had no idea what the words “Life Class” meant. And as I had entered the room during an intermis- sion, I was not to learn until the students again took their places. I secured a place on the outer fringe of the thirty or forty men who were grouped about the model’s stand. A young girl ascended the raised platform, on which there was a high bookkeeper’s stool. With utter indifference, she threw aside the kimona that enveloped her form and climbed on the stool where she assumed a pose which I can see in my mind’s eye to this day. For the first few minutes I was so utterly aghast that the slender ope of charcoal I held in my hand dropped crumbling to the floor. I blushed. sar heart beat furiously, I felt a choking sensation. I trembled in every nerve and fibre of my body. I was thrilled to the very core of my being, So this was the Life Class! I looked about and saw young men nonchalantly making marks and curves and angles—apparently (Continued on page 28
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| Never Look Back - by A Taxicab Driver — road, and if a loving couple wants to make a front parlor out of my cab, I should worry so long as they come through with the fare on the meter. When I was first in this business I was young and curious, but thirty years of cab driving on the streets of New York has cured me. I’ve seen everything The first cab I ever drove was one of those han- soms, of which if you see two or three a day now you see ’em all. The driver sits on top and when a fare wants to talk to him, he has to call through a trap door in the roof. Pete Dailey, the old Weber and Field’s comedian, once told me that riding around in a handom was like traveling in an open face watch. And Peter certainly knew what he was talking about, because he used cabs more than any other man in New York. But, as is often said, ‘‘Those were the happy days.” Last winter I stood in front of an apartment house on West End Avenue from nine o’clock in the even- ing until four the next morning—seven hours, and it was a bitter cold night. Inside the cab was two fares I picked up at Jack’s Restaurant at Forty-third Street and Sixth Avenue. The meter read $11.30 when those two young peel made up their minds to part. The girl went n an apartment house a block away, and I drove the young fellow to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. He gave me fifteen dollars—not much for an all-night job, but that’s the taxi-driver’s life which some people seem to think so profitable. And during the seven hours I stood in front of that house I never turned around but once and that was when the young fellow asked me for a light. Two or three times passers-by stopped and looked inside the cab and a couple of policemen hailed me— but there I was, stuck for a bitter cold night while two hearts that beat as one used my cab for a love nest. O, I never look back. N I just keep my old weather eye on the The young fellow told me when I dropped him off uptown that he was stuck on the girl, but her folks wouldn’t have him in the house so the only place they had to bill and coo was in taxi-cabs. There was more money in cab driving in the old days. It was five dollars from the Hoffman House to the Plaza, and nearly every night there were ten and fifteen dollar fares that pow is a dollar and a half or two or three dollars. And no gas and oil to buy then. Only a shake-down for Eli Peter, that was my horse, and rent in a livery stable for the cab. OU’D be surprised at the number of people that quarrel and fight in cabs. Yes sir, that’s so, especially late at night going home from restaurants and dance places. They get full of hootch, and everything that annoyed them all evening, which they couldn’t argue about in public, they fight about in the taxi. I had one good customer I used to pick up every night and he always had a lady with him. A different girl each time and he was some picker, believe me. The night before he would tell me where to come and get him the next night, always at the Palais Royal, the Montmarte, the Little Club or some other cabaret. No matter where I drove him, and it was often cat a mile or so, he would give me a new five- dollar bill. Well, one night I got him at the Rendezvous. As usual he had a lady with him, not so good looking as other girls I had seen him with, and I could tell from the way he snapped me up that they had been having words about something. I saluted him and said, ‘‘Where to, Mr. Swingle?”” He growled out an ; yy : y Le Wy, address and stepped into the cab, leaving the lady to get in as best she could. Well, that started another fight, and it’s a wonder the machine didn’t turn over the way they had it back and forth. Finally she made a pass at him with an umbrella and the point of it caught me behind the ear. I lost control of the wheel for a second and we hit a lamp- post with a bang that nearly doubled up my front right fender. When I stopped and got out to look over the damage, the door flew open and the lady runs out and takes a swipe at me; fists flying in the air. Then T got mad. “Let’s leave her here,” I said to Mr. Swingle, “and get another girl. This one’s no good.” He laughed fit to bust. “The lady, Jack, is my wife,” he said. , There wasn’t any more fighting by them that night in my cab. Of course, he couldn’t tell me, before her, where to pick him up the next night and I kind of lost track of him for a while. But early one evening when I was slowly patrolling up Broadway looking for a fare I heard my came called out. There, on the curb signalling to me was Mr. Swingle. He had some Queen with him! They got in the cab and I drove them to the Claremont for dinner. When they got out, he excused himself to the girl and came back and said to me, “Well, Jack, how do you like my new wife?” I grinned from ear to ear as he slipped a ten dollar bill in my hand, asking me to wait for him. He is again one of my regulars. The cab habit is like dope to some people. It’s so comfortable to ride in a good taxi-cab that getting used to it is devilish easy. I SUPPOSE the finest thing I ever had happen to me was this. I picked up a young fellow in front of Browne’s Chop House one rainy night in Decem- ber just as the Metropolitan Opera House was letting out. He was in full dress—he had come from the show at the Empire, alone. While I was crank- ing up, a girl comes rushing across the street from the Opera House. Without a word she opens the door and jumps in my cab out of the rain. When she saw the young fellow in it, she apologized, but he asked her if he couldn’t drive her where she was going. I took them to a swell home on One Hundred and Seventh Street where the girl lived and then I took him to his home. He gave me fifteen dollars and a big smile. That was sure a case of love at first sight. Six months later I got a letter which was addressed to “The Driver of Brown and Green Cab Number 7345,” through the Bureau of Licenses. I opened it up and there was a newspaper clipping announcing a wedding and a check for a hundred. I sure was knocked cuckoo. I certainly did not look back when I went to the nearest furriers and bought a neck piece for seventy-two dollars that I’d often promised my daughter, age sixteen, which I was never able to buy before. Several times, maybe on account of not looking back, I have received tips that were extravagant to say the least. Fifty dollars was the biggest. I’d hate to tell you the name of the man who gave it to me or the lady he was with. I never tell secrets. That’s why I’ve got a big bunch of regulars. The smallest tip I ever got was from a poor, bedraggled little shop-girl who was probably riding in a cab for the first time. She hops in, slams the door shut and lays back panting on the seat. “Where to?” I asks. “Anywhere, quick!” she cries out. A New York cabman is the only guy in the world who knows where ‘‘anywhere” is. It’s Central Park. So I drove her up to the park and just as I was going through the gate at Columbus Circle, the girl taps on the window and says, “‘I’ll get out here.” I drew up to the curb and stopped and she got out. “How much do I owe you?” she asked. “Fifty cents on the meter,” I said. She opened her purse and gave me ten dimes and four pennies, “I'd give you more,” she whispered, ‘only that’s all I got. You certainly helped me out of a hole. A fellow I was ith got fresh and I had to run for it. Your cab was the first place handy.” She started to go away but I caught up with her. I asked her if she had another penny and she said no she would walk home, it was only a mile or so. “Lady,” says I, magnificent like, “get in my cab and give me your (Continued on page 29)
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Did Audrey __Page Fifteen, Munson Take Poison Because of Me? knows the real reason why Audrey Munson, the shapeliest woman alive, tried to kill her- self the other day. When the beautiful artist’s model, whose adventur- ous career in the Eastern studios reads like a page torn from the unpublished manuscript of some master romancer, swallowed the little green mercury tablets, the newspapers of the United States blazed with a new and sensational mystery. Why had she tried to end it all? When the doctors declared that she had escaped death by a miracle, and was on the way to recovery, reporters were permitted to see her, but she sealed her lips against their questions. “There is a conspiracy against me,” she moaned, but that was all she would tell them. The enigma was never solved. All that the public ever learned was that a mysterious telegram had been received by the young woman, less than half an hour before she attempted to commit suicide. But what the contents of that mysterious message were, no one ever found out. There were some who surmised that it came from her lover—a “perfect man” physically, so it was said, who was to wed the languorously lovely Audrey in a supreme test of eugenics and seek to bring into the world a child of perfection. There were rumors that the telegram announced a breaking of that engagement. Audrey never told what she read in that telegram. Now it happens that I wrote and despatched that telegram. When I addressed it to Miss Munson, I had no foreboding that it would drive her to such frantic madness; that it would produce so tragic an effect upon her sensitive artistic temperament. But since her recovery there has been such fre- quent speculation as to the “conspiracy”? which she claimed balked all her efforts in life that I have decided to tell the truth about the matter, and include it as a legitimate memoir in these confessions of a cub reporter. If anybody is to blame, it is my city editor. He called me to his throne one morning, and between puffs of his old briar pipe, he said: “John, this is the open season for confessions ”’ “How come?” I countered respectfully. “Everybody is confessing,’ he amplified. ‘Pick up any magazine and you will find the confessions of a cradle robber, the life secrets of a Buddhist priest, and the revelations of a bus boy all in one issue. It’s getting to be an epidemic. Everybody is going to confession in the magazines. Now I’ve got an idea!” “Yes, sir!” I agreed. Whenever the boss has an idea, it usually means that somebody is going to do a lot of hard work—and he was looking at me. “People are very curious about life in the studios,” he assured me. ‘‘They want to know something about the romance of posing, and the morals of the models. Dumaurier and Murger are back numbers now. To-day the people think we have just as good a Latin Quartier as Paris, in Greenwich Village!” “Old stuff!” I stalled. ‘Everybody writes about the Village. I’ve even—” “Damn it, shut up!” said the city editor, with that pleasant way of his. “I don’t want any of your comments. I want the ‘Confessions of an Artist’s Model’ for this paper, and I want Audrey Munson to give us the dope. Go find Audrey!” ! Go find Audrey—there was an assignment for you! Audrey Munson, called the most perfect among all the beautiful women in the world; Audrey Munson who had posed for perhaps fifty famous white marbles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Audrey Munson whose seductive figure was the inspiration for all the sculptures in the principal embellishments of the San Francisco Exposition; Audrey Munson, whose motion picture, ‘““Heedless Moths!” a screen study of the studios, had created so much excite- | BELIEVE I am the only man in the world who sag nthaaraeff +n itd TS te ment; Audrey Munson who lately had vanished from Broadway—lI must go find Audrey! T turned out that Audrey was living with her mother in a little town called Mexico, in Oswego County, New York. I wrote her a frank letter and told her just what I was anxious to do, and told her plainly that if she’ could assist us in the way we desired, we would be glad to pay her for the informa- tion. After a lapse of some weeks, I received a postcard, which read: “Wrote you last week. Hope you're able to make it a series instead of one. “*Hastil seatiarey Munson.” Immediately I sent her a telegram—the boss gets peevish if you keep him waiting—and explained that I had not received her letter and please to let me know if it was going to be all right. I had sug- ested that we meet in New York and have’a con- erence. Audrey then sent me another letter, explaining that she was to meet her affianced lover in New York shortly, and that possibly we could have the conference at that time. After that several letters passed, rather at ¢ross purposes, and finally, under date of May 11, I received the following letter: “Dear Mr. ——(here Audrey wrote my first name) Am waiting a reply from you and wished to let you know that my "gee are changed in regards to coming to New York unless as your guest on business. As a man talked with me on coming on the 26th about putting my wedding rehearsal in films—calling together the Beaux-Art Society for a pageant, I’d hoped. He figured it his last haul— $15,000 for himself and $10,000 for Joe and I. Although small, it would be a good start in life for us. Perhaps you’re good business man enough to tackle the same proposition. If so, arrange as your post for me to come down and give you details, ‘or the series on the engagement and whatever the soy brings I must give Mr.— half, 3 “If its possible to have you furnish train fare also for two of our children, half-brother and sister, and hotel expense for couple of days, will be happy to show them New York, as I gave the older two a dandy time at your office expense, rather mine in the end. (What Audrey means by this is a mys- tery; no one in our office ever saw her.) “If we get together on business, want you to reserve a room with twin beds at that new hotel creased on Park Avenue, near Grand Central. ust put on a few airs to get the goat of my former husband on the same street. Well, how much of a business man are you and what can you do? Your office still owes me $250 and a $2,000 check I signed but didn’t get the money on. “Yours artistically, “Audrey Munson.” Well, in the first place I am a very poor business man. My tailor and all my other creditors can testify to that. I didn’t enthuse over Audrey's proposition to star her as a bride in the movies, though to picture men it might have been a good opportunity. Moreover I made diligent inquiry about that $250 and the $2,000 which Audrey mentioned, but no one in our organization knew anything about it. Finally I came to the conclusion that it must be some other newspaper. f This supposition was startlingly confirmed in another letter which came, after some more corre- spondence had passed between us. It read as follows: “Dear Sir,— ‘*You should be in possession of my letter to you this A. M. telling you I could be in New York on the 27th to see you. I am letting you know in time that I will not be able to use the tickets, if you do not send expense money also. Had expected some funds on Saturday and they are held back on pur- pose so that I could not come to New York. If you send one hundred dollars that will cover things of train money, eats on train and three meals in New York while there. If you don’t send it, I will write ——-— (here Miss Munson wrote down the name of one of the most celebrated men in the (Continued on page 29)
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wxteen— Who Has the Prettiest Back — Irene Castle Treman C tud ‘aa x Wide World Photo na Opiate Stusy " i : ; BACKWARD, TUI ONCE upon a time this is not a fairy of “Wizard of Oz” have the most beat world. Lotta has bi many years. But y good memories will | one more sight of th your youthful pulses Compare Lotta’s b of some of our mode Their owners are v make no mistake abo Indeed, a woman ordinarily proud of t deliberately turns he the camera! You ce what has happens i these unusual picture Now, pick out And if it isn’t hers believe has the most world. Better still, se with your answet. MIDNIGHT mea most perfect bac if it has to { Methuselah | Ss Marcella Swansoit Wide World Photot e 6 CrP e Lucille Chalfant Photo by i Jra L. Hill
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N BACKWARD! —no, my children, tale—Lotta Faust, ame, was said to tiful back in the en gone, lo! these uu old bucks with et a thrill out of back that stirred twenty years ago. ick with the backs n beauties. ry proud of them, it that. must be extra- et back when she ‘ face away from n see that this is 1 the majority of t favorite back. , tell us who you erfect back in the nd a picture along is to locate the < in America o back to Hayward dc World Photo_ Lotta Faust Sarony Photo Evelyn Law i »,, Ira.D, Schwarz Photo % * x Betty Blythe Wide Wor'ld Photo
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Page 6ighteen, _ The Crisis in by Marcel Prevost a crisis of modesty. In war swept countries as well as in those untouched by invasion or the residence of foreign armies, morality and virtue as our fathers understood them seem to be shaking at the very foundation. Eyecrnes people of the older generation are erplexed and worried at the way their children isten to conversations of a certain character and even take part in them. Health, disease, intimate surgical operations, morals and even perversity are discussed openly and the young person of to-day takes it all so matter of course that the older person wonders whether he is confronted with a very abyss of depravity or with an innocence so great that it doesn’t recognize evil when it sees it. Books and theatres seem alarming too, Even reputable authors stand sponsor for volumes heralded as ““Sodoma and Gomorra,” while theatrical posters in glaring colors and huge type startle the passer-by with lascivious titles surpassed only by the lascivious pictures which back them up. In most theatres art, wit, talent have been driven to the nacbetound) scenery, girls and nudity take their place. As for dances—not only in rhythm and step but in the dancers’ position to each other—they are directly opposed to the dances we were taught as children. There is no reason why one dance should be more taboo than the other—all modern dances are essentially alike—and dangerous—in so far as they consist in a supple corps a corps embrace, in a tender, rhythmjc promenade set to more or less sensual or exciting music. The embrace is so close that, as a famous dancing teacher put it, “if a dollar gold piece were placed between the dancers it shouldn’t fall to the ground but remain in place till the music stopped!” And the modern girl is not even protected from an enterprising pressure by what our great grandmothers called the vertugadin, the “guardian of virtue,” in our day known as the corset! The immodesty of clothes has been the subject of too many sermons for me to go into detail here. Skirts reaching to the kneetops, bodices cut down to the waistline in the back and at the sides, stock- ings as transparent as tracing paper revealing the wearer’s form boldly and frankly no longer cause any astonishment, Formerly it took an audacious woman to appear at the seashore in a one-piece bathing suit. To-day, in all countries, girls of the best families emerge from the water clad in costumes which resemble as closely as social order permits the costume of Mother Eve. And in such abbreviated dress they feel no embarrassment in showing them- selves before any Tom, Dick or Harry on the beach. Why is this? Is morality collapsing all over the world? Is virtue becoming a thing of the past, purity a cliparesed attribute, self-control an unknown asset No. The very evident crisis of modesty does not imply, as far as the younger generation is concerned, a crisis of morality. In judging manners and customs we must not confuse appearances with reality. It is particularly essential to remember that modesty and morality are two very different things. Modesty is to morality what trimming is to a dress. Modesty is the incidental, morality the essential. Morality is based on the fundamental laws of virtue. Modesty is its more or less artificial covering or background. While virtue, according to the dictionary, implies a state of mind which leads us to do good and to shun evil, it is generally interpreted to mean Ts whole world seems to be passing through “chastity” when applied to women. All standards of feminine morality throughout the ages have been based on this interpretation. The reason is evident. In the first place, man has always looked upon woman as his most prized possession and the most elusive, the most impossible to hold; she is the only one he can lose without knowing it, the only one that can be stolen from him while remaining at his side. Realizing the hopelessness of trying to guard her by force, man instinctively tried to teach her to guard herself and always impressed on her that the greatest crime she could commit was to allow herself to be stolen. In the second place maternity is a certainty, aternity an act of faith. The purity of family Rneage! the continuity of ancestral inheritance depend on woman’s virtue. These facts are the pillars of all morality. If they crumble our whole social morality crumbles. In the past they have been flouted only in times of Modesty! Member of the French Academy trouble and social unrest. With stable conditions eee invariably reassumed their fundamental place. ‘he law of virtue—which may be briefly expressed in two points: that a girl should be pure at the time of her marriage, and that a wife should remain true to her husband—has remained practically un- changed through the centuries, in practically all countries. But the laws of modesty changed incessantly, according to time, place, climate, fashion. Modesty may be mistaken for virtue. But it is not virtue. It is a feeling of fear of anything that might affect virtue. While various peoples’ morality may be on the same level, how different, for instance, are their standards of modesty! To take the matter of clothes, and without turning to savage tribes or Lacedemonian gymnasiums, what a contrast be- tween the various peoples of the Western Hemi- sphere, in our day! In Russia and Finland the whole family, father, mother, children—boys and girls—stretch out peacefully and naturally beside one another in the one-roomed, hermetically sealed and laboriously heated isba. While traveling in England I saw at Penzance, a popular watering place, masters and pupils of a boys’ school bathe in the costume of Aprollo Belvedere while women and girls on the beach looked on without any embarrassment. Innumerable cases of non-modesty might be cited in countries foreign to us. They surprise us but it would be wrong to infer that because their standards of modesty differ from ours these people are less moral than we. . Innumerable cases of sur-modesty might also be cited which seem equally astonishing to us. ee isn’t very long, for instance, since a young native girl of Egypt—English Egypt, at that!— with only a scarf or shawl wrapped around her body would hasten, if a European passed her on the road, to pull off this garment and hold it up before her face. The modesty of woman’s face, as one might express it, rules the whole Orient. A woman may show her body, but not her face. To show her features is the essence of immodesty. In distant parts of Berry, a French province, the peasant women would be as mortified to take off their embroidered caps in public as they would to take off their chemises. One might continue indefinitely to cite examples showing how diverse are the standards of modesty in dress. And the same is true of books, plays, pictures. Of course there are grossly immoral books. But barring these, books are judged very differently according to their time and place of publication. Rabelais’ work did not seem indecent to his con- temporaries. But a modern book containing the same expressions would be forbidden. Shakespeare’s youthful heroines have nothing to learn about the realities of love, not even Juliette, who was only’ fifteen. The Vatican museum is not a -bit more chaste than other museums and yet many of the Popes were saints, and intelligent saints . . . The mystéres played at the Church steps in the Middle Ages would shock the most blasée woman of lay. I choose the examples haphazardly because the fact they demonstrate has been stated thousands of times. The same things are considered modest or immodest according to place and time. And with it all, morality remains about the same. (Continued on page 23)
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ems Page WVineteen “The Little Laughing Thing” by Thomas Edgelow Posed by Josephine MacNicol of the Greenwich Village Follies. Moonlight was responsible for the actual declara- tion, for one balmy summer night Gertrude strolled along the shore, her little hands clasped on Trevor's tweed sleeve. - The man stop face between his “Oh, give it up—all of it, my darling,” he whis- en tensely, ‘What is money—or duty? Nothing s really worth anything but love.” She gazed up into his eyes, and she might have weakened, when Trevor crashed on to his own doom. “T could teach pleasures. Automo —just emptiness.” Now Gertrude liked money and pretty clothes and a shiny motor-brougham, driven by a liveried chauffeur. She liked expensive candy and silk, and soft , and marble baths sunk in the floor. She liked all these things, and she did not mind Norman Allison—very much. Yet she loved Trevor Forbes. So she drew away from Trevor, and said: “I—I can’t forget duty, or honor.” There were other meetings, but Trevor could never persuade her to more than a stolen kiss. peeenuys and took the girl’s ands, with simple Ee to be happ iles, lothes are only expensive The tragedy of a girl who wanted the fine things of life and the price she paid! rometnt a a Parone ses reriniet ainepmigrnping - cal On the Allisons’ return to New York towards the end of September, Gertrude refused to permit Norman to renew the lease of their apartment on Park Avenue. She wanted a home, and no one could have a home—a really truly home—in an apartment. And she had discovered the cutest, littlest house, as old, as old as could be, down near Sheridan Square. “T hate this Greenwich Village stuff,” Norman, “and I won’t stand for it. An isa nuisance. Certainly not.” So he pacuased the house a week later, and Gertrude had a gorgeously happy time with interior decorators, and in the more expensive furniture stores. Trevor Forbes lived in a studio on Fifty-seventh Street, so Gertrude’s caprice had nothing to do with being near him. “It is so delightfully quaint—sort of Father Knickerbockerey,” she enthused to her husband, as she showed him over the old house. “And I shall be very, very happy here with my cross old bear.” Whereupon he pinched her cheek and stopped grumbling at the amount of money she had spent. Gertrude brought her servants with her, and she, alone among women, was never troubled with the eternal question. For servants adored Mrs. Allison. rumbled a house There was never any difficulty. The small house, therefore, was ably staffed by Cowper, the butler; by Ruth, the maid, and by fat old Mrs. Bracy, the superlatively excellent cook. Browning, the chauf- feur, did not live in, so he didn’t count, At dinner one night, soon after the little house was occupied, Gertrude was chattering away to her husband. “Poor Edith Stillson had tea with me this after- noon,’”’ she announced in her child-like way. “I think it’s a shame. I gave her some of my clothes. It—it must be dreadful to be left a widow with no money. Think of wearing other people’s clothes.’’ Perceiving that Cowper had left the dining room, Norman replied tenderly: ‘Generous little girl! I might slip you a check to help her out.” He sighed. “And—and that could never appre to you, There ought to be nearly a million for you if anything happened to me.” “Norman! Norman! Stop that!’ “Stop what?” he asked. She hurried to his side, and then perched herself on his knee. “Don’t talk about things like that. About you dying and everything, I mean. And about leaving me money.” Three nights later, about eleven, when Norman (Continued on page 31)
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Page TJwent: harged With by fulfon Ourslerx— HE police took the man who thought he was Archie Middleton, but who looked like someone else, to the Sixty-second Street Police Station, presided over at that hour of the evening by Lieutenant Patrick Monohan. here is no nonsense about Lieutenant Monohan’ He is a hard, practical policeman who never believes anything that he doesn’t see. Very early in life ot the straight dope on all that Santa Claus stuff. Not once in his childhood had he fallen for a fairy tale. To this day a racing chart is to him a racing chart and nothing more. His views on the spirits photographed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have never been published, but those who know him best are positive that he considers them “‘a lot of malarkey,” if not indeed “a bunch of mahooey.” With these picturesque synonyms denoting a brand of nonsense particu- larly offensive and incredible, Lieutenant Monohan is understood to have enriched the American vernacular. Certainly he introduced them into the Sixty-second Street Station House. At eight o’clock that evening Lieutenant Monohan was in the worst of spirits. In the morning Republi- can papers he had been singled out as a jackass and criticized as a hang-over from the dark ages in the New York Police Department. His district had been referred to as a cesspool and a sink-hole of algal . ithin an hour after reading these compliments the Lieutenant had learned of two daylight hold- ups six blocks from his desk. A little later a Police Department Ford had been stolen from outside the station house door, and finally the Lieutenant had been served with a subpoena to tell the Grand Jury boys what he knew about “the system.” jeutenant Monohan’s eyes were peevish and his brow was tangled and snarled. His tongue was doubled up down in back of his lower lip, which was his way ee registering to any stray camera that he was sore. So long had he kept his tongue in that position that he was finding it hard to untangle it, when the door opened and two of his patrolmen marched in. Between them they bore a wild-eyed young man in evening clothes over which he wore a light overcoat and on whose head a silk hat reposed at a most discouraged angle. The policemen led their captive to the brass rail ‘and saluted. “Well?” grunted Lieutenant Monohan. “We went up to the Sixty-second Street house where the call came from,” reported the senior of the two patrolmen virtuously, “and when we got there the family and the servants was all out, except Mrs. Lansing, an aunt of Mr. Middleton’s, and a servant named ‘Bunch.’ Mrs. Lansing was having hysterics. Bunch was guarding this guy here wit a gun. The charge is unlawful entry. Nobody seems to know what has become of Mr. Archie Middleton who owns the house. as far as we could learn.” Having made this report, the two policemen again saluted and stood still with the beatitudes engraved openly on their honest faces. The harried, pale- faced young man in evening clothes looked sadly and submissively at Lieutenant Monohan, That much maligned guardian of the district at length iit Ai to unravel his tongue. Grim satisfaction gloated in his eyes as he looked at his prisoner. New York was in the midst of a crime simoon. The papers and the public were howling at the police inefficiency and here was a full-dress burglar, a gentleman crook, captured and arraigned. For Monohan it was one of life’s great moments, ’What’s your name, crook?” snarled Monohan. Nothing missing ‘to this problem. At length THE CHARACTERS IN THE STORY Archie Middleton, young, rich and hand- some, has just received a letter telling him that Anne Winter, the girl he loves, is about to marry a villain as part of a conspiracy, of which she is innocent, to get hold of the Middleton fortune. It is his earnest desire to go in person to nne Winter whom he knew since boyhood, but of whom he had lost track when she learned that Archie’s bounty was her sole support—a bounty gladly paid by Archie because he always felt responsible for the childhood accident which made Anne a cripple for life. Had Anne consented to marry him he would never have engaged himself to 3 Miriam Blanton, the Piano King’s daughter who wanted to get on in society and the Middleton name meant more to her than the Middleton millions. Indeed, it was in search of coveted geneological records that Archie came across the fact that every third Middle- ton had become insane, and he was next in line. Using this as a pretext to break his engagement, he calls on iram Blanton, her father who promptly kicks him out of the house when Archie says, “T have come to tell you that I cannot marry your daughter.” He cannot understand Blanton’s conduct, and returns to his Fifth Avenue mansion where he is greeted in his library by Bunch, the Middleton butler, who points a revolver at him while Mrs. Lansing, his aunt, stands terrified in the doorway and does not récognize him either. He looks at his reflection in a mirror and discovers, to his horror, that there has been an entire change in his appearance! “Archie Middleton,” softly. Lieutenant Monohan started to scratch the answer on the blotter and then halted, sputtering ink all over the page. “Look here, you,” he growled, “I didn’t ask you what house you was in. There ain’t no nonsense about me, understand that! What’s your name?” cad Middleton,” was the prisoner’s obstinate reply. “Can it, you cheap bum!” yelled Monohan. “What’s chewing you anyway? You tell me your name, damn quick and no nonsense! There is no nonsense about me I tell you! Now, spill it!” The prisoner stepped closer to the rail and looked squintingly at the chafed Lieutenant. He studied his countenance as if ea) to fathom the answer e spoke. “Excuse me, if I seem vague,” he pleaded. ‘You see, I am not quite sure just what is happening. All that I do know is that I have suddenly gone crazy. It runs in our family. I just found out this after- noon that every third Middleton was a lunatic, and right after finding it out, I have gone crazy myself. Really, I feel very odd. I am going to try to make it very easy for everybody. I realize perfectly that I am Archie Middleton—but every time I look in the mirror at myself I think I see somebody else. My grandfather thought he was xing Solomon. Now it’s my turn. I don’t know who I think I am, but probably that will comé later. Now won’t you responded the prisoner please let me go—there is a young woman I wish to see on very urgent business, Mayn’t I go now?” “Ts hea nut? Does he really think he’s Middle; ton?”’ gasped Monohan, appealing to the senior policeman whose name happened to be Skeliy. “We, Lieutenant,” returned Skelly flattered, “he’s either cuckoo or else he’s making out he is. When I tried to arrest him he yelled that he was Middleton himself, no less. But I knew he was ly- ing. I know Mr. Middleton, for I work his post! Ain’t it my business to know him? This bird ain’t any more’him than me! Archie Middleton is a black-headed man! Look at little blondie here— ellow as the right end of the Follies chorus, And r. Middleton had a fancy beard. This guy’s chin is as hairy as an egg. Archie Middleton had black eyes, This cheap skate’s got eyes the color of a reformer’s nose. Archie Middleton had a long aristycratic nose. This guy's nose looks like Jack Dempsey’s. Archie Middleton has a war scar on his right cheek, This man hasn’t got any scar. Besides,”’ concluded Skelly with an injured air, “he don’t look like Archie Middleton.” “Maybe it ain’t him, then,” proposed Monohan with a pontifical air. “Tt ain’t,” declared Skelly with conviction. “Gentlemen, may I interpose a word?” put in Archie. “Can you what?” asked Monohan reddening. ‘May I explain?” “Anything ne say will be used against you,” reminded the Lieutenant dutifully. “Yes, but look here! I have just solved this thing! I understand the whole business now! It’s alla part of my craziness. All this time I have been imagining I was in a station house talking to police- then. Of course not! Why should I be in a police station? I just imagine I am in a police station. It’s a delusion. I must be in my own home. You must be Bunch there in front of me. I thought you were a damn fool old Irish policeman! Bunch, Bunch, don’t scowl at me like that!” Undoubtedly Monohan was scowling. For the first time in his life the Lieutenant got an unpreju- diced opinion about himself. “You cheap crook,” he grated at the prisoner, “what sort of a song and dance is this? You’re no nut! Once and for all, are you going to stop telling me you are Archie Middleton and tell me who you really are?” - “But I don’t imagine myself to be Archie Middle- ton,” protested the prisoner, and Lieutenant Monohan brightened. ‘I know I’m Archie Middle- ton! I imagine I’m someone else!” “Aw, Hell!’ exclaimed Monohan disgustedly. He leaned back and swept a gnarled hand across a sweating granite foretead “You are John Doe, that’s who!” he pronounced in the tone of one who has abandoned all hope of reason and kindness prevailing. ‘You’re going to spend to-night in Cell Number 7—the cockroachiest cell we’ve got in this dump!” And settling back in his chair, a crumpled and defeated Monohan ordered his prisoner to be searched and celled. ae search of his clothing was as interesting to Archie as it was to the station house attendants. The evening clothes he had on were undoubtedly not his own. They. were made of the cheapest broadcloth, whereas Archie was particular about his clothes. There were details Ali finishing which instantly proclaimed to his practiced eye that they were not his and never could have been his. Yet they were tailored and fit him perfectly.
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“Page Jwenty One _ His Own Murder/ “What’s your name, crook?” snarled Lieu- tenant Monohan, The underwear was cheaper and coarser than any he had ever worn in his life, yet they were his size. The shoes fitted him snugly, but were not the kind of shoes he would have selected. If he had tried to tell the police attendants who searched him that these were not his clothes they would have laughed at him. Every garment fitted him too precisely for denial. Wisely he held his peace about them. Moreover, Archie was too impatient to care much about them. He was churning with inward excite- ment; torn between kindred emotions. On the one hand he felt certain that all the mystery in which he had found himself so suddenly and so unaccountably engulfed was due to the fact that, true to the Middle- ton heritage, he had lost his senses. Everything that was happening he believed was a delusion of his sudden insanity. On the other hand, he knew perfectly well that Anne was in some kind of danger. Somehow he believed in that ominous note he had received, and he was desperately trying to think of some method by which he could secure his release and go to her assistance. These thoughts were in his muddled mind while the attendants were searching him, but he was suddenly recalled to his immediate situation by a discovery which they made in one of the pockets of his trousers. : An attendant had suddenly drawn out a handker- chief. It was his own handkerchief of silk, mono- gramed in one corner and it was damp with red blotches and stains. “It is soaked with blood!” cried one of the at- tendants. ‘And I bet it will make a pretty how- do before this case is over!”’ Archie looked at the thing without first realizing its serious implication. In a detached kind of way he was curious how red paint or blood could have been smeared on his handkerchief. But when he saw the knowing glance thrown from one policeman to another, he understood or thought he did. The pole thought this was a clue to violence. Some bloody crime had been committed, of which this was an indication. But Archie told himself that the handkerchief was not real. The police attendants themselves were not real. Nothing around him was real. He only imagined they existed, but so well had he imagined them that they were playing their parts appropriately. To them he was not Archie Middle- ton at all—because he himself fancied he was not Archie Middleton. They thought him a burglar and in his pocket they had found a bloody handker- (Continued on page 24)
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“Page JDwenty Fw ea Thirty Years In Tin Pan Alley Harry hustled away to a restaurant and after a meal of steak, coffee and pie we fixed matters up with the landlady. Fortunately for us Dunn’s daughter liked the song and on the following day we got ten more dollars from the publisher and he became owner of ‘“MyOld NewHampshireHome.” From then on we continued to grind out songs, selling them to publishers and actors for whatever we could get, until we found an opening with Jos. W. Stern & Co,, who, in return for the exclusive publishing rights to everything we wrote for a certain length of time, gave each of us a weekly drawing account of ten dollars. Shortly after we signed up with Stern & Co., E. B. Matias the silent partner, who was a keen judge of popular songs, purchased “Jack How I Envy You” from Cavanaugh & Co., and “They Never Mention Your Name” from the Consolidated Company, and made big sellers of them after the original publishers had stopped working on them. While we were with Stern & Co., we turned in a raft of songs, the best known being “Just Come and Take Your Presents Back,” “The Swellest Ladies’ Coon in Town,” “Zam, Zam, Zam,” and “Don’t Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me.” I had always preferred to write ballads, but as Ragtime was just coming into vogue the publishers insisted that I give them “coon” songs. Luckily I was versatile enough to adapt myself to the new rhythm, A peculiar feature about the song writing game is that when a new rhythm comes into popularity most of the established pass into the discard because they can’t acquire the knack of writing in the new style. Of course they try, but few of them succeed. When our contract with Stern expired Andy and I went back to free lancing. One afternoon. we spotted a new sign informing the world that Feist and Frankenthaler were music publishers, We showed them a song called ‘Nobody Cares.” They couldn’t see it, but before we left the office I borrowed a few dollars on the song. Whenever we couldn’t sell a song I tried to borrow anything from fifty cents up, with the understanding that if the loan weren’t ped back within a certain time the song would come the property of the publisher. We parted with dozens of songs in this manner which we never redeemed. What became of the manuscripts I UNN came back in fifteen minutes and gave ID us the five dollars.) We immediately can’t say, but I surmise most of them were destroyed,: Later, when I had become known, a few of them were published. During the first six months I was with Shapiro and Dunn I collaborated with several writers. and from a dozen songs I landed three hits. With Sterling I wrote “Where the Sweet Magnolias Bloom,” with Arthur Lamb, “A Bird In a Gilded Cage,” and with the late Will Heelan, “I’d Leave My Happy Home for You.” I picked up the idea for “Happy Home” while I was playing with Sidney in Hartford, Connecticut. I met a nice young girl there who wanted to go on the stage. I tried to talk her out of the idea, but she didn’t seem to take much stock in what I said. The night before the show left town I escorted her to her home in the suburbs. It was a lovely moonlit night,.and as we stood at her gate I gazed at her home, a regular country mansion, and remarked: “Y’m sure you wouldn’t want to leave such a home as that for a life of drudgery on the stage.” She looked at me, blushed slightly, and said: “T’d leave my happy home for you.” She didn’t, however, for I induced her to promise not to go on the stage until I played her town again, That was the last I saw of her. In the meantime, ““My Old New Hampshire Home,” which had been on the market two years, had become a hit. Feist had also made hits o! “Stories My Mother Told Me,” and “You'll Get All That’s Coming to You.” My name on a song had come to mean something to the profession and trade and the publishers wha had lent me a few dollars on songs I never redeemed published some of them hoping to capitalize on my prestige. I naturally preferred to write with Sterling, but as he now had a drawing account with Harms and Harry Von Tilzer to- day after thirty years of composing songs and ballads that have made him a millionaire. Co., he had to give Harms first crack at half the songs he wrote with me. Every other song we com- leted we tossed a coin to see whether Harms or Shape should get it. The one who lost out on a toss would get the next song. “Down Where the Cotton Blossoms Grow” came to in this way. We wrote it in Andy’s apartment, which he was sharing with two other writers, I had the toss and was playing it over just before going back to the office when Harms entered the apartment. “Ts that for me, Andy?’ Harms asked. “No; this is for Shapiro,” I replied. “It’s a wonder you wouldn’t hand me something on that order,” Harms remarked, 4 “We will,” Andy said. ‘Within the next few ays. A week later Andy and I got together and wrote “I Wonder if She’s Waiting” for Harms. Not long after that incident Dunn and Shapiro admitted Louis Bernstein as a third partner. I had been hoping to get an interest in the business, but Bernstein’s coming appeared to kill my chances. So when Joe Hurtig of Hurtig and Seamon, pub- lishers and burlesque producers, offered me a liberal salary and a third of the publishing business to join them I told Shapiro about it and said that unless he could take me in as a parioee I would quit. He and Bernstein considered the matter and finally bought out Dunn, I was made a third partner and the name of the firm was changed to Shapiro, Bernstein & Von Tilzer, I continued to turn out hits and near hits, includ- ing “‘When the Harvest Days are Over Jessie Dear,” “Her Name is Rose,” “Oh, Oh, Miss Phoebe,” “I Ain’t Gonna Weep No More,” “Jennie Lee,” “My Jersey Lily,” and ‘My Lady Hottentot.” When our professional following became too large for me to handle J brought in my brother Albert as Von Tilzer’s Life Story an outside man, Al. made good from the start, but unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be able to hit it off well with Bernstein and the two were forever quarreling. The climax came while I was away on a business trip and Al. was let out, I didn’t find things any too pleasant when I returned, but I tried to make the best of a bad situa- tion until I could get out and go into business for myself. Then two song writers hastened my exit from the firm. I met them coming out of the office one afternoon. They had a song entitled “‘Josephine My Jo,” which had just been rejected by Bernstein. I liked the title and I knew the boys could write, so I asked them to step into the office and play it forme. When they had finished playing and singing it I was confident it was a hit number. I went into Bernstein’s office and asked him why he had turned it down. p “They wanted fifty dollars advance on it,” he replied, “and I don’t think it’s worth a dollar.” I told him it was a hit, that I was going to accept it, and give them fifty dollars advance.” “The first draft of My Old New Hampshire Home,” in Von Tilzer’s handwriting “And what’s more,” I said, “If I were you I’d let songs alone. You're no judge of them and you're very likely to turn away hits.” My accepting the song didn’t improve matters, and when conditions became almost unbearable I asked Shapiro to make me an offer as I wanted to get out. He held a conference with Bernstein and then refused to make an offer, So I agreed to take a thousand dollars for all my interests. My offer was accepted and a few days later I received a check for five hundred and a note for an equal amount. I quit the firm when the two partners were con- gratulating themselves on having another hit in “Josephine My Jo.” The day after I quit Shapiro I heard that Chas. B. Ward, composer of ‘The Band Played On,” and “Strike Up the Band,” who was publishing on the other side of Twenty-eighth Street was lookin, to sell out. I called on Ward and at the end o two hours bought his catalog and office fixtures for five hundred dollars, That was in December, 1901, I was in business for myself at last! The first thing I did after raising some money on the note was to send for Sterling. I had to have some good songs in a hurry and I didn’t know of any one who could do the job better than Sterling. For the next two weeks Andy and I spent our evenings together working on songs, and at.the end of that time we had turned out half a dozen including “I'll be There Mary Dear,” ‘When Kate and I were \counesat on page 23)
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mn —____--—----—-—----—--- Passing through Hell (Continued from page 9) shop, he told him that he had been sent there to run the prison. - “And I’m going to run it, sweetheart,” he shouted at the top of his voice, “there won’t be any more soup served in this hotel, cut it out right now, to-day. Give the boys scrambled eggs, sirloin steaks, the best that the market affords and send all the bills to me. 1 The guard of course immediately reported the affair to the warden who hastened to Tommy’s cell to investigate. The warden had had a lot of experience with phoney nuts, convicts who pre- tended that they were insane and just as soon as he looked at Tommy he began to laugh. “Crazy eh,” he grunted, “crazy,” he repeated, “say, you're starting in early ain’t ya? Why didn’t ya wait until ya got acquainted before ya started this game.” “Who are you? Who are you?”’? Tommy inter- rupted him. ‘“I’ll have you locked up if you don’t stop making faces at me. Get away from here, get away from here.” “When I get through with you,” the warden continued, ‘“‘you’ll be a regular nut, believe me young fellow. I’ll knock all those ideas out of that Trish, bean and if you don’t come on out of that cell and go to work why I’m going to start in working on you to-day. What do ya say, going to work?” Tommy laughed and screamed and went on with his silly antics and crazy remarks. About noon that day they took Tommy out of his cell to the hospital for an examination. The warden wanted to be sure. that he was only pretending insanity before he started to “work on him.” The pelson doctor was called in to make a diagnosis. e seated Tommy on a chair and made him cross his legs while he hit him just a little below the knee cap for the purpose of testing his reflex action. The reflex action was all right, the reflex action of a normal person. He blindfolded Tommy and made him walk unaided through the big cell of the hospital, he tested the accommodation of the pupils of his eyes and did a number of other things that physicians do when there is any question as to tlie mental stability of a person, All the tests that he put Tommy through indicated that he was sound mentally. ‘‘He’s shamming,’”’ he told the warden, ‘‘nothing wrong with him; he’s perfectly sane in every re- spect.” “Do you get that,” the warden snarled at Tommy, ‘get what the doctor says?” ‘ “Ha, ha,” Tommy laughed right in the warden’s jace. (Continued on page 30) Crisis of Modesty (Continued from page 18) At present we are passing through a period of trans- ition. Our social fabric has been shot through by war, conditions aré tinged wi h the restlessness of the after-math. And in the midst of all this a new type of girl has evolved. he older people are rather appalled at her. She seems so reckless in her way of talking, dancing, dressing, so determined to suit herself. And older people shudder. They forget that this girl grew up during the war, that she was sent out alone, unat- tended, ofter far from home, in the midst of men and conditions very different from those of her own circle, She acquired self-confidence. She realized that in the arts of peace she could compete with man. Didn’t she carry on his work? And in the hospitals, in order to unfold the tender pity and loving solici- tude which every woman feels for a young, sufferin aman, she had to discard her painfully acquire notions of modesty. In the wards of physical tor- ture, amid the cries and moans, the smell of blood and iodine began the real communion of men and girls of the ps en ed generation. The girl who has been through the war can no longer feign the ignorance so often mistaken for innocence. The young girl to-day admits knowing things her mother was not supposed to know until after marriage, but she regards this knowledge as something perfectly sane and natural, and. with- out priding herself on it she no more thinks of hiding it then does a well brought up boy of sixteen or seventeen, Her mind is no less pure because of it. But her standards have changed. She no longer trembles with fear lest her virtue be affected. She knows too well what virtue consists in and refuses therefore to be bound by old conventions of mere their language have little to learn of life. "Page Jwenty Tarce modesty! So modesty has been reduced to the pate essentials. But there is no depravation in this. : Incidentally, it may be remarked that the idea that a girl should not only be intact but ignorant is a relatively recent one. While some quotations might be assembled proving the contrary, the fact remains that until the eighteenth century the type of a girl saved from evil by her ignorance of evil was very exceptional. As I said before, the young girls portrayed by Shakespeare know what they are about, and Racine’s ingenues, if more reserved in Moliere’s ignorant Agnes is a little monstrosity brought up to please a maniac. In short, until about 150 years ago, in all countries of the world, modesty of lan- guage and manners was the apanage of the married woman, not of the maiden. If a girl was engaged, she knew that love and marriage was in store for her, she knew what she was entitled to and did not hesitate to ask for it in very definite terms. If she was free, it was her privilege to listen to one suitor and another, and in her talks with them the discus- sion inevitably turned on Jove. All that was asked of her was that she keep’ intact, for the benefit of an eventual husband, what the law of virtue demands shall be guarded. But the young wife, the young mother was expected to be the image of modesty, She was not allowed to talk of love, except to her husband, nor was she allowed to enjoy the society of men other than her husband, Her friends were to be chosen among women as ex- emplary as herself. In other words, the married woman was deprived of the right of seeing whom she chose and of acting with the freedom of a girl. This ideal of wifehood and girlhood, venerable because of its antiquity, is perfectly logical. From a social as well as from a moral point of view a wife’s virtue is vastly more important than a maiden’s. But about 150 years ago moralists and -essayists started probing into the married woman’s heart. Her transgressions became the center of interest, and the young girl was relega ed to the background. She gradually came to be looked upon as a sort of stereotyped figure, bound by given conventions like the figure in the old Italian comedies, and scarcely less fictitious than they. The young girl was supposed to ignore the very name of passion and love. She was supposed to know nothing of life. Why people married, how children came into the world, all realities of life were hidden from her. And if, by chance, she learned about them she was supposed to lose her greatest charm and asset, her innocence. She found it best, therefore, to feign ignorance under all circumstances. The conventions of virginal ignorance were first destroyed by Anglo-Saxon nations. Since then the evolution everywhere has gone towards creating equal standards of education for boy and girl, closer association of the sexes in work, study and play. Under such circumstances ignorance would be dangerous. The freedom with which girls and boys are allowed to meet has largely done away with senti- mentalism and love of romance. When a girl of the former generation was allowed to be alone, for a few minutes, with her best friend’s brother, her heart used to beat like Hero’s when she saw Leander at the edge of the Bosphorus. If that same girl were young to-day she would have danced the tango a hundred times with her friend’s brother, he would have taught her to swim, toride.. . .. their reciprocal emotivity would be dulled and only marriage would awaken it, Let us beware of judging the following generations by the standards of the former! We imagine our- selves—products of our habits and temperaments— placed in the same position as the young people of to-day and it all seems impossible. But we must remember that people change as conditions change. Often in looking at couples on a dancing floor I hear older men burst out, quite sincerely, “How can they stand it? Haven’t they got any blood in their veins?” s Of course they’ ve got blood in their veins, and red blood too, the young people of to-day! Only it doesn’t react to conditions which are perfectly normal and commonplace, to them. They’re ae an artist studying a model, or a surgeon examining a patient on the operating table. They are not moved emotionally. Quintilius’ words on memory, Augetur exercitio—it is strengthened by exercise—doq not apply to love. On the contrary. n other words, barring books and plays for which the younger generation is not responsible, the immorality which makes older people tremble leaves the younger generation quite unmoved, They have adapted themselves to new conditions, they live in the present, are the present, and remain at heart as uncorrupted and natural as their mothers and fathers were at their age. A new type of girl is coming to the fore. She js different from the old ideal, less sweet, less pliable, less gentle, and the evanescent softness of modesty has been rubbed off her, like the velvet down off a peach. But these ‘‘de-velveted” girls appeal to the men of their generation. They marry young and face the future bravely. With the new order will come inevitable catas- trophies, but on the whole young people are steering their course remarkably well through the chaos brought about by war and conditions for which not they, but their elders, are responsible. Thirty Years in Tin Pan Alley (Continued fom page 22) Coming Through the Rye,’ and “On a Sunday Afternoon.” The chorus of ‘‘Sunday Afternoon” came to me in a dream; at least, that’s how I figure it out. I fell asleep one Sunday afternoon and when I woke up I found myself humming a new tune. So I finished it, called it ‘(On A Sunday Afternoon,” and had se write the lyric. hen I was with Shapiro I thought I was busy, but when I went in for myself I knew I was busy; I had to write songs, teach them to artists, and look after financial matters. Then on nights when I was writing songs I made the rounds of theatres, to interest performers in my numbers and exploit my songs. I wrote “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows” for a show and it was rejected by the manager. I had faith in the number so I went around to the different cafes and sang it and it always took with the crowd. Once Nora Bayes stood up and joined in the chorus with me and that set the song going, No matter where I went, night or day, I was either lugging songs or looking for new ideas. One night rower to see McIntyre and Heath and when I came out after the show it was raining—no, pouring. While I stood in a doorway watching the rain and waiting for it to let up I thought of the idea for “Alexander,” and before the rain stopped I had written a melody for the chorus. New writers trying to break into the song game now have a peculiar idea ‘about the business, Each one considers his song a gem and worth as much as “Over There,” which sold for $25,000. Only the other day a new song writer, one who has hever had anything published showed me a new song, and offered to let me have it for five hundred dollars advance. It wasn’t a bad song, not to my way of thinking, but there was nothing unusual about it, and I didn’t care for it even as a gift. I have in-my safe a score of songs equally as good but which I don’t believe will ever go to press. I liked those songs when I wrote them, but since then I’ve come to feel there is no market for them, And that’s a peculiar feature about the business. A publisher may rave about a certain song to-day and detest the sight of it a week later. And there’s no accounting for it. There are times when a publisher will reverse his opinion of a song after it has had g thorough tryout in public, but I’m not referring to this change; I have in mind the publisher who goes to bed raving over a song he accepted that afternoon only to wake up vowing he wouldn’t give a nickel for a hundred likeit. I know in the years I have been in business I have changed my opinion about certain songs, even after having had them introduced by stars in vaudeville and musical comedies. Perhaps the young man who offered me his song left with the idea that because I write and publish my own songs I’m unable to see merit in the work of others—especially that of newcomers, Well, if he did, he was wrong, for on’more than one occasion I have sidetracked my own numbers to exploit songs by outsiders. Take, for instance, the case of “Carolina Sun- shine.” It was offered to me by two unknown writers at a time when I was all set to go after one of my own songs entitled, “When the Harvest Moon is Shining.” The plates had already been made an orders, for regular copies and orchestrations maile to the printer. After hearing ‘‘Caroline Sunshine,’ however, I phoned to the printer to hold off on “Harvest Moon” and be prepared for a rush order on a new ballad. When the young man who wanted the five hundred in advance left the office I turned to Sterling, wha had been present during the conversation, and said; “Can you picture us asking for five hundred when we started out, Andy?” (Continued on page 31)
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Poses Jwanty Foye ere Charged With His Own Murder (Continued from page 21) chief with the initials “A, M.” in the corner. To them they were a clue. In silence Archie got back into his clothes and in silence he was conducted to a hand-picked cell assigned to him by Monohan, Fortunately for Archie his mind was too occupied to worry about cockroaches. He tried to concentrate on Anne; steadily refusing to ponder any more on his own mad predicament. All that mattered anyway was the one tremendous fact—he had gone mad! He let it rest and went on to the vastly more important fact—Anne was in danger and he was prevented from going to warn her. Yet, he asked himself, if he were mad how could he remember Anne? Vainly he tried to reconstruct the incidents of the evening and find some other interpretation except insanity. It was impossible! He knew that he had felt all right when he entered the taxi. During the drive to the Blanton apart- ments he had been thinking earnestly about Anne and had also felt rather ill. Now he cursed himself for not having gone immediately to Anne. Instead he had gone to the Blantons. The maid had not recognized him; Blanton had kicked him through the door; Bunch, his own ser- vant, had held him up with a revolver! His aunt had called the police—and finally he had beheld in the mirror his own reflection transformed into an unrecognizable image. i As he thought of that ghastly reflection, Archie shuddered, It was not only that the color of his hair and eyes had changed. The very consistency of his hair had been transformed and the wayward elf-lock over his right eye had disappeared. The contour, the outline, the very shape of his head, was altered. There was not the faintest shadow of resemblance to his own self in form, feature, com- lexion or expression. Palpably and unmistakably t was the face of another man. Now Archie knew that such a miracle was alto- gether impossible. The best detective in fiction was never so adept at disguise that he could not recog- nize himself. The most skilled actor can detect himself beneath the most artful make-u How could he explain this mystery? Was there any reasonable explanation for such an enigma. __ No! There was no such thing! He was not ina jail! He had not been arrested and he was not sitting in a cell! Hiram Blanton had not kicked him out! Bunch had never pointed a gun at his head! He had never seen that fantastic image in the mirror! It was all a phantasm, all a delusion, all a mad, mad dream! At any moment he might wake up! Yet, what was he going to do about Anne? Anxiously he paced the floor of the cell. His body yearned with a desire to rip aside the iron bars and tush to her, Never had he felt so great an urge to act! Never had he felt so impotent! It came upon him then that this madness was surely consistent in its irksome garment of reality. It all seemed so real, though he told himself it didn’t exist. He really felt like a prisoner. The problem was dizzier than he had realized at first. The appearance of two guards was a relief. They meee the iron door and silently beckoned him out. Down the stone floored corridor they walked turning and twisting among halls of caged men, emerging finally into a brilliantly lighted room where a group of uniformed men were gathered. In the air was a heavy fragrance which Archie instantly identified. It was a perfume used in abundance by his Aunt Hilda. Undoubtedly, Mrs, Lansing had but recently left the place. ; Still believing that nothing around him was actual or real, Archie wondered if he were asleep in his library and his aunt was nearby and the odor of her cologne water was borne to his nostrils as he slumbered, It was all so much like a dream. But, if it were, Archie was now required to pay attention to what was happening in his dream. Lieutenant Monohan was hunched behind a small flat-topped desk, and in chairs nearby were several other policemen. One vacant chair was in the center of the room and to this Archie was conducted. Smiling, Archie sat down, folded his arms and inquired: “Am I about to get the third degree?” There was an ominous disapproving pause. The accusing faces of the police were like carved faces in grained granite, impassive and displeased. Lieuten- ant Monohan was the first to speak. He leaned forward and said: “Look here, crook, you cheap bum, we know more abont you than you think we do and we know a whole lot about what is happening to Archie Middleton.” Archie sensibly remained quiet. ‘We know,” went on Monohan, “that Mr. Middleton left his home in a taxi-cab. We know he was on his way to see Miss Miriam Blanton to whom he was going to get married, and we know that since then nobody’s seen him. We know that he never arrived at the Blanton flat and that’s more than twenty-four hours ago. So, you see’— “Say—that is wild language,” cut in Archie. ‘Why, I left my house tonight at seven o’clock, not last night. Why, Bunch got the taxi for me, he can prove that!” j Glances were exchanged among the policemen and Archie could read their message. At least. his earnestness was beginning to arouse them. They doubted his sanity, but were now beginning to believe him mad on quite a different tangent than he believed himself to be mad. “You still think you are Archie Middleton?” asked one of the policemen, not unkindly. “No, I am Archie Middleton,” insisted Archie, “I still think I am someone else.” “You say that you left home at seven o’clock tonight?” “T did,” “Well, what date is it now?” “The seventeenth and Tuesday,” answered Archie with confidence. A murmur, a chuckle and a shuffling of thick- toed boots—all these Archie heard, and then Monohan’s grating voice grimly saying: “Tonight is the eighteenth and Wednesday!” Beads of perspiration stood out on Archie’s fore- head. How was it possible? He knew it had been the seventeenth when he left the house and Tuesday and seven o’clock in the evening. By a dozen con- firming details he knew that was correct. From that moment forward there was no gap; no hiatus in his memory. He could remember everything that had happened to him hour by hour, almost moment by moment. Yet there was an entire day to be accounted for—twenty-four hours he had utterly lost out of his life, if what this man said was true. How could a day vanish from his recollection leaving no break to show where it began and where it had ended? Were these policemen lying to him for their own purposes? Or was this another delu- sion of his bubbling gray matter? “Let us proceed, gentlemen,” suggested Archie, simulating a confidence he no longer felt. “Mr. Middleton has been missing twenty-four hours,’”’ went on Monohan relentlessly, ‘Tonight a special delivery letter came to the Middleton home addressed to Mrs, Lansing. Read it!” He tossed an envelope across the desk and Archie reached for it. The address was written in his own handwriting! He had never written any such letter. He had never addressed any such envelope; these things he knew before he rend. Yet every character in those finely stroked letters was undeniably and indelibly his own. “This is my own handwriting,” he admitted as he looked around at them. “Tt is like hell!’ snapped Monohan. Archie Middleton’s writing! You read it!” With hands that trembled a little Archie got the single sheet of paper out of the envelope and spread it flat. It was only a few lines, but every character was in his own familiar script. Now, however, it was the message that got him and enmeshed him in a new web and tangle of bewilderment. This is what he read: “Dearest Aunt Hilda: “I am a prisoner in the hands of my enemies. They swear they are going to kill me. They also want to burglarize our house and get some of my papers, aesiich are in my library desk. Watch it! Get the police to guard you! I haven’t time now to explain the accident which enables me to send you this letter. I may be murdered at any moment, but before I die, I’ll give them the fight of their lives. Love, and perhaps good-bye. Archie.” Monohan an is men were watching their peroner with crafty, cunning eyes as Archie thrust ack the letter across the top of the desk. He looked back at them in stricken astonishment. “It’s my handwriting, but I never wrote it,’’ he said wearily. “What does it all mean anyhow?” For reply, Monohan rose stiffly from his chair and walked over until he towered before his prisoner. One hand was behind his back, the other seized Archie's right shoulder roughly. “You're no nut!’ he snarled bitterly, ‘You're a dirty damn crook! We’re getting the right dope.on you now! Middleton wrote that letter to his aunt “Tt is and wanted her to look out for burglars and half an hour later they find you in the library! How do you figure that out?” Archie passed his hand wearily across his eyes. “T can’t figure it out,” he replied. as morning following the arrest of the burglar who was found in the Middleton library and who insisted that he was Archie Middleton was Anne Winter’s wedding day. Judged by many of our modern standards, Anne was an old-fashioned girl. Due to that early accident which crippled her, she limped; but she could bowl, she could play tennis and even an occasional daring round of basket ball, Anne had learned these things at Bryn Mawr. When she had run away from the Middletons and all her old wealthy associates she found a place to live on Second Avenue. Earning her own living, she nevertheless found. the time to do a great deal of social service among the people with whom she lived. She had practically introduced sports into certain old world quarters of the east side. Anne was modern enough to like this kind of amusements, though she was old-fashioned enough to love such simple things as dead leaves and black trees and gray mists over the waters of the Central Park lakes. It was Anne who taught many of the girls in her neighborhood to play tennis and to bowl. She met them and helped them through the medium of what was known as “The Second Avenue Praying Band,” When Anne first joined the band it was an earnest unprogressive evangelical enterprise. In the begin- ning Anne greatly shocked most of its old guard. Because of them her reforms were gradual, but they were complete. Under her warm influence the band’s activities expanded marvellously. A com- munity club house.for girls and boys was. established. A playground for small children was laid out. Com- mittees to visit the sick and imprisoned were formed. Al! this Anne did in her leisure; during the day she worked in a wholesale paper house:as a stenographer, but she gave eer ody, mind and soul, to her social service activities in the evenings, Saturday afternoons and all her holidays and Sundays. Anne rented a room from an Italian family that over-populated the top floor of a tenement building. Tt was a pleasant enough room, always bright wit sunshine in the mornings and a dainty surprise amid its squalid surroundings. In the window that looked down on the washin, hung across the courts of the flats below, green an pink geraniums blossomed in terra cotta pots and there was a fresh sweetness to the little boudoir that was very like Anne herself. On this gladsome autumn morning Anne’speedily prepared her miniature breakfast on a stove inspired to cook by canned alcohol. Singing a gay capriccio with a sad little strain under its melodic mirth, she set about arraying herself for her wedding. There was a pensiveness in her manner that set oddly against preparations for a bridal. Anne was neither downcast nor melancholy, but there was undoubtedly a haunting wistfulness in her brown chatoyant eyes, set so wide apart on her serene and calm countenance, Archie had always praised those eyes of Anne; he said they were $0 spiritual, so like the Sistine Madonna. But then when Anne was near he was given to saying blandilo- quent things and believing them too, Anne’s beauty came not from feature, but from character. It was a fragile and tender kind of beauty, and the fine delicate features, the umber hair, the soft ery of her eyes all seemed forever effacing their own loveliness in order to flower into single expression of gentleness and goodness of eart. e To the sick in the East side flats and to the sullen in the East side jails it seemed that Anne’s soul was looking out at one from her eyes, and some of the superstitious declared it was the soul of an angel. In their delirium some of the sick said that her soothing and comforting voice was like the murmur of rippling waters from their homelands far away. But now, Anne, who should be gayest and happiest on her wedding day, was thoughtful, and her voice as she sang Toaiive snatches of that sad Neapolitan tune was low and dreamy as if old memories were stirring against her will. When all the little household cares of the room were attended to and water poured on the flowers blossoming s0 bravely near the tigerish teeth of the elevated ties, Anne slipped on the coat and hat which had aroused the critical instincts of Bunch, the serving man of Archie Middleton. (Continued on page 27)
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rage Jwenty Five A dainty pose of Veronica whose life story reads like a page of romance She dancesnightly be- fore New York's amartest cabaret hounds. ERONICA’S life story, as told by herself, reads like a romance. She was brought up on the sidewalks of New. York. illful, pleasure-loving, lithesome and graceful with a desire only to dance, she soon fell under the influence of a smart young man, Will Langley who induced her to marry him. She was but fourteen at the time and precocious, so it was easy enough for her to pass for seventeen. lad to leave a home where she was ‘‘misunderstood,” she eloped with Langley. A week’s honeymoon at an Albany Hotel passed like a dream. Then her husband told her they must pack up get back to New York and go to work. She was disillusioned. She had been promised a life of ease and luxury. ogee é But she dutifully returned with Langley to the great city where they lived in a dingy hall room. A week passed, when one morning there was a knock at the door. Veronica opened it. A woman with a child in her arms stood on the threshold. “‘ You hussy\” she cried, ‘‘you have stolen my husband, I am Will Langley’s tawful wife.” Veronica offered to show the woman her marriage certificate. hoarsely. é My hands were shaking as I extracted it and put it into her hands. She read it greedily. Then she looked at me with a new light in her eyes; the tender compassion of a mature woman for a child. \ ibe me see it!” demanded the strange woman “How old are you?” she asked me. “Fourteen and a half,” I se) the truth coming out in spite of myself. With her free hand, she reached out and drew me close to her. She pressed her cold cheek against mine, motheringly. The Life Story O Veronica Queen of New Yorks Moulin Rouge “He lied to you, baby,” she whispered. “I have been his legal wife for five years!” Nye there was only one thing for me to do, and that was to clear out of Will’s; rooms, then and there. I did not want to go home, but that abandoned mother convinced ine that it was the thing I should'do. She pleaded for my parents until the tears came to my eyes and I| forgot my own sorrow and disillusionment in my feelings for the father and mother I had treated so shamefully. A prodigal daughter, I rapped at the door of our third floor flat that day just as the sad little family was seated for the noon-day meal. And right then and there I learned that the best friend any girl ever had, or ever will have, is her mother, and after her, her father. I had been callous, and deserved nothing from them. Yet they made me welcome with tears arid sobs and laughing with joy, and I was never so humble, nor so happy before. I told them the truth and they forgave me. It was an easy matter to have the marriage annulled, because I was but a child. y father wanted to send Will up for bigamy, but I persuaded him not to. Will had been kind to me; he had tricked and deceived me, but never once had he been harsh, All my tears and pleadings were necessary to save him from my father’s wrath; first he was going to kill him, and then he was going to have him ar- rested, but finally he was content when the court released me from the ties of marriage It was only a few weeks after that, when I came across an advertisement in a morning newspaper which proved to be the gateway to my public career. I still have the clipping somewhere among my things. The advertise- ment read like this: WANTED. Young girl to learn to walk a tight-wire; must be pretty and a good dancer. Apply, John Nestor, The address was given as a dance hall on the East Side. . When I read this I came leaping toward ny mother. in a frenzy of childish ‘delight. This was just what I wanted! I was sure I could dance well enough, and I was so vain as to think I was pretty enough. And I felt sure I could learn to walk on a wire. Oh, how that idea thrilled me! I could picture myself, wearing a dress of pink silken flounces, turned up in the back, darting back and forth on a slender, graceful wire; swinging my parasol as a balance, high, high, high in the air! ; My methers lips settled into that thin straight line which had been the sign of het disapproval since the days when I cried fot
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Page “Twenty Sim colored bits of silk in my baby carriage, “That is all nonsénse!” she exclaimed se- verely. “Don’t yes ever dare think of it again!” I could think of nothing else. I ran back and forth through the flat, crying with eager- ness to run around to that East Side dance hall and get that job. So excited did I become that I was nearly hysterical; finally mother ran down to the corner drug store, and called Dad on the phone. He came right home. Dad advised me kindly, and when that did no good, he even threatened to send me away to an institution as incorrigible, but I think his common sense ultimately prevailed. He knew how wild and capricious my nature was. The runaway marriage had made him look at me thoughtfully, I often had noticed. Now he anid reasoned to himself that it might be better to let me have my way, and try to keep control of me, than to balk me and have me do some outlandish thing without his knowledge. He and mother went into the bedroom, closed the door and talked for half an hour. When he came out, he took me by both my hands and said to me: “Veronica, my dear, you go! And if you're going to be a tight-rope walker, take care of yourself and don’t break your neck!” kissed him for the first time in years; then, frantic with delight, I kissed my mother, and putting my jaunty little red tam-o-shanter on my head, I scudded down the two flights of stairs and out into the street. Inside of half an hour, I was in the dance hall, but at the door my hopes were dashed to the ground. There were at least twenty other girls there —pretty girls, too; some of them a lot pret- tier than I was, I enviously admitted to my- self, and one of then was dancing out in the center of the floor, in front of a big red-faced man in his shirt-sleeves who was observing her intently. “Won't do!” bellowed the man, all of a sudden, just as the girl was in the midst of what I could tell was her best step. “You're too fat, and you haven't any charm. Next!” A little red-head bounced out of the crowd, and as a piano thumped away at the other end of the room, she tried some dance steps. It didn’t take the big, red-faced man two minutes to decide about her. “You can’t dance!” he howled. “Your best bet is to wheel a baby carriage in the park. Next!” I don’t know what impulse drove me to such audacity, uhless it was the frenzied fear I had that someone else would get the job be- fore he got around to me; at all events, I suddenly pushed my way through the girls in front of me, and glided out into the cleared space. Another girl was also coming timidly for- ward, and her embarrassment gave me my chance. The piano resumed its thumping, and I spun rapidly around into the lilting measure of a fox-trot. At that time I was only begin- ning as a toe-dancer, but I did know all the regular steps, and a few of my own invention, and the moment that I was in the dance, that ring of anxious girls simply faded from my vision; so did the big man with the red, per- spiring face; all I sensed was the floor and the air and my body, moving in rhythmic beat with the music. On across the floor I swept, weaving my hands and arms in fantastic patterns of ges- ture, some of them as new to me as they were to those watching me, others the result of long practice in stolen visits to dance halls. “Stop!” roared the big man with the red face. “Cut it!’ As the piano music ended, I halted abruptly, staring at him, a bit frightened. Had I failed? The anxious question was beating through my brain, and I thought I was going to cry in front of them all. “All you dames can go home to mother!” bawled the big man with the red face, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “If this one ain’t what I want, I'll send for you. I got your names.” I remained in the center of the floor, dazed and dumb. had never felt so detached; my mind seemed numb. First I had been frightened because I thought I had failed. Now I was scared because I thought I was suc- ceeding. “What's your name?” asked the red-faced man, folding his arms and eyeing me with approval. “Veronica Marquise,” I managed to reply. “Well, my name’s John Nestor. I’m the boss of this outfit. You look to me like you'll do. How old are you?” Of course I lied to him about my age. He asked me a long string of questions about my family and my experience, and then he gave me heart-quake by saying: “Go in that room and take off all your clothes!” “What for?” I gasped. He grinned in a friendly way, and said: “Now, don’t get nervous, sister. There ain’t going to be no harm come to you. If you can make good here, you’re going to make some money and so am I. Now, five got to look you over, and rehearse you, and I can’t do it in no rig like that. See Aunt Hilda in there and she'll fix you up!” Aunt Hilda was a colored woman who looked to me almost as big as an elephant. She helped me out of my clothes, and finally twisted a slip around my middle, leaving the rest of me bare as the day I was born. My thoughts were suddenly scrambled and confused, and I was really shaking all over. That first night of intimacy with Will in the Albany hotel had been bad enough, but ap- earing undraped before a strange man like fohn estor and the other men who were hanging around filled me with terror. “Lawdy, chile, if you is goin’ to stay in de show bizness, you goin’ to soon fergit all dat,” said Aunt Hilda. “People on de stage don’ think nuthin’ ’bout not wearin no clothes. This human document baring a cabaret dancer’s heart will continue next week. Then you’ll know what happened between Eddie and Veronica. Dey don’ think clothes is any importance, chile. It’s a wonder to me dat dey wears any in de street in hot weather. Yas, chile—you goin’ to git over all dat.” I am glad to say that I lived to verify Aunt Hilda’s prediction. But I also lived long enough to learn that modesty is not a matter of clothes, but of character. John Nestor rubbed his hands with satis- faction when I emerged from the dressing room, unclad and thoroughly ashamed. “You were built to walk on a wire!” he ex- claimed. “Look at those thighs! Look at those ankles. You're the right stuff, I’m think- ing. Know any fancy steps?” I believe I forgot to mention that after I returned home from Will’s rooms, I did not o back to the coffee house, and I spent my leisure time in practicing toe-dancing. In a few weeks I had become amazingly proficient, and I timidly asked John Nestor now if I could borrow a pair of dancing shoes. I had a pair, but in my haste I had come away with- out them. In a few minutes, I was surrounded by an interested ring of his assistants, while I posed in warious attitudes. Each one seemed to de- light John Nestor more than the others. Fi- nally I stopped; my repertoire of dancing tricks was at an end. “That’s all I know,” I told him. “Well, that’s enough,” he said heartily. “You seem to have the sense of balance, too. What I want is a girl who can do what you do on the floor, but do it on the wire. Now, if you will take a try on the wire, I can tell pretty darn quick whether you are what I want, or not.” He lifted me as if I were a doll, and then carefully. held’ me while my struggling feet rr fumbled in trying to find a balance on the wire, And then he held my hand. It swayed rapidly, dizzily, that wire, and my head was giddy from it. I clutched him desperately, while he stood there, like a rock. And pres- ently a native sense of equilibrium came to my assistance, and I stood poised. “Now, you've got it,” he whispered, his voice kind. “Just stay there until you are sure of yourself. I won’t let go. Then take a oe forward.” efore that first lesson was over, I could walk back and forth on the wire while holding his hand, which he declared was wonderful; and more than that, I could balance myself alone and unaided, except for an umbrella, for several minutes at a time. Twice I fell, and once I got a nasty gash on my knee, but I didn’t mind that. I thoroughly enjoyed the lesson. “You're hired!” said Big John, as I soon heard everyone around the hall calling him. “Now, I'll tell you what I’m framing here. I’m framing an act of three girls on three wires—something new for vaudeville, take it from me. I got two good ones, and now I think I've got the third. And I’m willing to pay for rehearsals, although you ought to pay me for what I’m teaching you. Fifteen dol- lars a week during rehearsals; fifty dollars a week while the act is working, and your transportation paid. What do you say?” “Suits me great!” I breathed, unable to speak above a whisper. I went home delirious with joy, but my hap- piness found no echo in my worried parents. They were distracted at what pleased me so mightily. They had already repented over let- ting me go. But it was too late to draw back, and the money made a big appeal, for Dad was not doing well, and every dollar counted. He knew I could never earn fifty dollars a week in a coffee brokerage house. 5 HE next few weeks were full of wonderful experiences; of hard work, of many, many falls; bruised arms and legs, tired muscles, and constant wearying practice. But I did not mind. John Nestor was as manful a man as ever drew breath. He was white clean through, and I adored him. But there were other things which gave an unpleasant touch to what otherwise would have been a wholly enjoyable experience. There were two other girls rehearsing in the wire work. One was Julia Glading, a sister- in-law of Big John, and a nice enough sort of girl, but not in love with her work. some man had come along and married her, she would have jumped off the wire so fast you couldn’t have seen her shoot. The other girl, Ruby Summers, was a differ- ent proposition altogether. She was born in a dressing room, she told me, and had never known any other life. She was always stylish- ly dressed, and wore a great many diamonds, and she drove up to the rehearsal hall in a big car with a chauffeur. I used to wonder how she did it, until one day I got an inkling. She brought her gentleman friend along. He owned the car and he acted as if he had a proprietary right in Ruby.. He was what the girls call a “swell dresser,” and he swung his cane as if he had been born with it in his hand, Ruby brought him there, I think, to show him off, and there she made her big mistake. I was up on the wire when he came in— by this time I was perfectly at home in the air, and was practicing wire dancing—and his glance met mine, just as I was doing a run back to the support. I understood his glance, even as I ran. y few weeks in the sophisti- cated company of these show people had taught me a lot; I knew, for instance, that it is perfectly possible for a man with whiskers to tell a bare-face lie. This fellow had a fancy beard, and thick, curling brown mustache. He looked like ready money. All through the rehearsal, he stood there, watching me furtively, and once I hear Ruby’s shrill voice calling him down for it. After that Graham—Ruby let everyone know his name, and got mad when we asked her if he was in the cracker busittess—came almost every day. .But the curious part of it was that while (Continued on bage 28)
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nv /OMOHT. 5 ___Page Fwenty Seven, Charged With His Own Murder (Continued from page 24) Surely they were plain garments, rather out of fashion. Anne preferred them to the creations of Hickson, Henri Bendel or of Tappé—not because she did not love beautiful clothes, but because these coarser garments were akin to the people among whom it was her delight to serve. Had she gone to them differently arrayed, her purpose would not have been so well understood. At the door of her room she gave a lingering look at the little iis of flowers as if she were bidding a fareweli to all the dear remembrances of which they were colorful and beautiful symbols. Then she locked the door and limped quickly down the three long flights of steps emerging breathlessly into the bellowing, shrieking clamor of Second Avenue. A band of yelling children, of, shawled and wim- pled old women, croaking and chattering their gossip forlornly in old world tongues; of lanes of push carts overburdened with fruits and vegetables and cheap merchandise; of brawling truck drivers, and raging elevated trains, struck her with a terri- fying force. This was the far east of upper Harlem at morning tide. Always it appalled her by its ferocity. Anne never learned not to tremble at its overpowering furious clamor. Yet it held for her a compelling challenge; its mingled misery and brutal noise held her fast to the penance her quixotic conscience tapeeet he turned and walked westward to Third Avenue, limping along quickly until she was near the corner of 116th Streét. Leaning against the post near the corner was a young man not more than twenty- three. He was Clarence Borden, the man Anne was to marry. Clarence Borden had a curious history. He was an ex-convict whose chief weakness was cheating at gambling. Some months before he had gotten religion at the Second Avenue Praying Band and had gained Anne’s sympathy. His past was never mentioned any more. ore than any other single influence, Anne had managed to reform him. Now he had obtained a foreign missionary appointment in Ceylon. With tears in his eyes he had come to Anne and told her he believed he would fall back into his old disgraces when he was no longer under her influence, It was about this time that Anne read in the apers of Archie’s engagement to marry Miriam lanton, What passes in any woman’s heart under such a crisis is always a mystery—but Anne agreed to marry Clarence Borden and to go with him to Ceylon. Looking at him now as he stood there unaware of her approach, it was not difficult to understand why some of the older and wiser women of the Second Avenue Praying Band had shaken their heads and disapproved the marriage. Clarence Borden was not an imposing looking young man. He was frail with a pinched bilious face that held a perpetual look of injury in its expression as if someone had picked on him since his cradle. There was rather a chap-fallen air about him; a (pune lifeless depression which bespoke a view of ife permanently jaundiced. His appearance, even on his wedding day, was a trifle unkempt. Certainly the coma of silken hairs on his chin should have been shaved. But his hair was freshly barbered and his expression of injured innocence was polished. As he heard Anne approach he turned and grinned, showing undoubted pleasure at her arrival. When he spoke his voice was low like a girl’s, and the wraith of a lisp clung to his words. “Hello, Anne,” he said. ‘‘Gee, you look great! Are you all ready?” “Yes,” replied Anne. ‘How are you, Clarence?” “Fine, fine, fine, this sweet and beautiful morning. I have the license in my pocket Anne. Let’s go. I can hardly wait.” “Very well,” agreed Anne, and said no more. : ERS el they mounted the elevated stairs and boarded a train for downtown. “Where are we going?” asked Anne. “You know T left all the details to you.” “The preacher is an old friend of mine,’’ Clatence assured her. “He lives down on Twenty-third Street. He is an odd sort of a chap, but wonderful, too. He began life as a beauty doctor. Then he was a scientist and a minister and a lawyer. He lives among the Armenians down in Little Armenia, He is an old family friend and the man that, outside of puvan did most to make me a Christian gentleman. know you will like him.” Anne made no reply. Now that the great and dangerous step ape which she had decided was so near at hand, she felt strangely perturbed. She - Clarence murmured ‘posters i old picture plays—a rebuked, di ‘was about to unite herself in wedlock to a man with an evil past and to fly with him to the uttermost end of the earth. But she reassured herself by rejoicing in the good work that she and Clarence could do among the native savages as well as the redemption of her husband which her presence insured. In silence they rode until the station at Twenty-third Street was reached and they hurried out with the crowd. As they were passing the newstand Anne’s eye chanced to fall on a morning newspaper. Three words leaped up at her from the printed page. Three words from the giant black headline. “ARCHIE MIDDLETON MURDERED?” Those were the words! Dizzy with astonishment and fright she clutched Clarence by the arm as he plunged on toward the exit and pulled him back. ce she cried weakly. ‘What does that say?” Clarence’s eye followed her printing finger and he quickly read aloud the headlini “Here, my dear, my dear, don’t get so excited,” he counselled. “I’ll buy the paper and you can read it!” He threw down three cents in front of the Greek, and folding the paper led the way down the steps to the street, his expression denoting greater injury to his finer feelings than ever. When they reached the sidewalk he attempted to lead the way directly to their destination, but Anne rebelled. “Let me read that first,” she pleaded. “And why,” he pouted. ‘You are holding up our wedding. That is most distressing to me, Anne. oe bad luck to delay a wedding. Come, do let us urry!”” But Anne, her face white with fear, had drawn the paper from him. Moving down the street a little way, she stepped aside from the passing crowds into the shelter of a cheap little picture theatre lobby. Within its comparative seclusion and while and urged her to come on, Anne unfolded the paper and read the story: _“A combination of extraordinary circumstances lead the police to believe that Mr. Archibald Middle- ton, the wealthy young clubman and war hero, has met with foul play. Detectives all over the state are searching for bis body. Meanwhile a man is under arrest at the Sixty-second Street: Police Station who the police believe is seriously involved in the crime. “Mr. Middleton is known to have left his house on Tuesday evening about eight o’clock. He never reached his destination which was the home of his fiancee, Miss Miriam Blanton, daughter of Hiram Blanton, the piano king. “The next evening, however, servants captured a burglar in the Middleton library and turned him over to the police. (Here followed an account of the subject telling of the blood-stained handkerchief and other details.) “Early this morning members of headquarters detailed at the station house were still giving the prisoner a stiff grilling and important disclosures were expected. A peculiar feature of the case is that the prisoner insists that he himself is the missing Mr. Middleton. The police believe he is doing this to build up a deliberate case of insanity as his defense. He bears no resemblance to Mr. Middleton whatever. His face is of the marked criminal type. The police are giving him the full benefit of the third degree and his confession is expected. Otherwise he will be held on a short affidavit charging him with making away with Mr. Middleton.” With staring eyes Anne stood. there, a stricken little: figure unmindful of the petty harrassment of Clarence, who was anxious to go ahead with the wedding ceremony. Her nervous fingers grasped the edge of the marble counter before the ticket seller’s window as if she were afraid she would fall. She neither saw nor heard him. In her eyes was a mist and her cheeks were gray like overburdened clouds. She stood very much removed from the rumble and hubub of the busy street, struggling with a mighty and overwhelming fear. But the fear was stronger than she and its clutching Hy pe at her heart opened its sealed locks, released its long closed doors and let forth a long imprisoned ghost. It was the wraith of a love she had starved, but which would not die. A wan, wasted, hungry; soul ghost, it came out now and stood beside her there in the brash lobby of a ten cent theatre; in the glare of the autumn sunlight it came amid fla He wn crushed love spirit now risen and resurrected out-of the tomb of her heart to prove itself immortal. Why had it not died—out of her heart agony she asked it then—why had it not died? Anne loved Archie Middleton. She loved him the first day she set eyes on him, “never be, pping torn © a little girl in a pinafore. She adored him and lived in the sweet dream of growing up and loving him forever. She loved him the day she crashed against the stone. She loved him when the surgeon told her she would be a cripple all her da: ca with fiercer and deeper desire she had loved him that day, pe her woman’s heart had unfolded then and she new. And Archie had loved her. Proudly Anne could remember that. The wrack and the tragedy of it all! Straighten out that pitiful tangle and warp of bones in her side,—let her run! let her leapt let her dance her way down the years with him—that were happiness! In sweet and sacred moments so she had sometimes dreamed. But that could never, They had taken her to all the great apostles of science and one and all they had said the same thing. Anne would never run, never leap, never dance again. Then she had statved the spirit of her impossible love. But all its yearning had gone on hungered still for lack of vain and idle hopes. Steadily to her tasks Anne had set herself; unflinching she had gone to the work she had found. She‘had told Archie she loved him too much to permit him to wed the woman with a twisted shape and out of his world she had gone, secure in her heart’s belief that he could and would forget her. Never once did she approach him until the day when she was making ready for her marriage. Then, perhaps in a moment of weakness, she had gone to him to say good-bye. But she was glad when she found he was not at home. In Anne’s make-up was the iron and granite of unshakable resolution. Archie alive she could put from her heart. But Archie in danger— The spirit of her crushed love stood beside her weeping, pleading. It was a woman shaken with unspeakable anxiety that looked at the impatient man beside her and heard him say now: “Dearest Anne, won’t youcomeon? The minister is waiting. Why should we longer delay?” Dumbly she shook her head. For a moment it was all of impossible for her to utter a word. When she did speak her voice was dry and lifeless. “Call me a cab,” she said to him. “A cab?” he protested. “It’s only two blocks to the preacher.’ : A shuddering kind of loathing seemed to seize her and make her draw away from him. She raised a Semuline white hand and a taxi drew up to the curb. “Not—not now. We must wait,” she told him brokenly, and giving an address to the driver she disa ‘peared inside. The door slammed shut as Clarence reached the curb, his protestations lost on the winds of the morning. Gy that same Thursday morning there was no nonsense about Lieutenant Monohan. Lieuten- ant Monohan had a grouch on. The driver of the wagon called it a cucukorino. The very warmest of the Lieutenant’s admirers have never contended that his was a cherubic nature. Instead they have palliated his one tendencies with the argument that of such volcanic and eruptive material are good olicemen made. The Lieutenant was in a Vesuvius- like state of mind. All night long he had been giving his prisoner doses of third degree stuff in the hope of pinning a ‘confession on him when he was arraigned. e wanted to stage a come-back with the newspapers. Of course the third degree is a wonderful institution, and Lieutenant Monohan swore by it. As a result of his labors of the night before the Lieutenant had been kept out of bed until dawn; two of his huskies had black eyes implanted by Archie Middleton’s fist and the entire station house menage was con- vinced, the Lieutenant included, that the prisoner was a violent maniac. In this conclusion the prisonef partially con- curred. In fact in all the arguments he insisted that he was crazy. The difference lay in their varying conceptions of the delusions which obsessed him. The police thought he was crazy because he believed he was Archie Middleton. The man under atrest thought he was crazy because he believed he was not Archie Middleton. Which made Lieutenant Monohan tear his hair. The Lieutenant, all fussed by his cucukorino, looked up from his desk and beheld Anne Winter gazing at him. - He knew Anne. Nothing else in the world could have softened his wrath that morning like the sight of Anne’s sad eyes, unless his old Irish mother risen from the grave. He almost smiled. “Good moran? he said stretching out his grizzily paw. ‘And what brings you here so bright and early?” : (Continued next week)
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Page Twenty Sight : s The Life Story of Veronica (Continued from page 26) Graham was watching me, someone else was watching me too. There was a young acrobat with our troupe, who did some hair-raising feats on the tra- peze. He was muscular and handsome; I think he had the handsomest body of any man I ever looked at. I will confess that I used to thrill with admiration just to look at him. But he would never look at me when I looked at him. I was never introduced to him, and he never addressed me. I knew that his name was Eddie Fields, but that was all I did know about him. His eyes were on me constantly when he was not working, but whenever I looked at him, he turned hastily away. Once I tried a smile on him, and I thought he would collapse. For a big, strong, handsome man, he was the shyest I ever knew. From his glances I, could tell he resented the way that Graham looked at me, and I knew pertectly well that Ruby hated me for it, Yet if she thought I was trying to wean her Graham cracker away from her, she was vastly mistaken. I was utterly uninterested in him. Then one day matters came to a head rather unexpectedly. Something had weakened the supports for the wires, and I was forced to remain down on the floor until the repair man could straighten things out. While he was hammer- ing and thumping around, I retreated over to a corner by the piano, and sat down, to finish a chapter in a book I was reading, until I was forced to look up by a shadow which crossed the page. There was Graham bending over me. “Helloal” he said, with a jaunty grin. I smiled at him discouragingly, turned my chair a trifle, and went back to my book. “What are you reading—a prayer book?” he asked. 4 “No! Iam reading a book on ‘How to Mind Your Own Business,” I snapped at him. He laughed. “Say,” he whispered, growing confidential. “You knew you are a big fool working at this job. Fifty dollars a week! Huh! I can fix it so that you can live like a queen!” “Yes.” I told him. “I’ve heard that before, too. “On the level,” he argued. “I can fix you right. I got plenty of money.” “Keep it!” I answered. But he wouldn’t let up. He argued and argued to.me how much he could do for me. Finally, I told him I was tired of listening to im. “Well, give me a kiss, just for friendship sake,” he begged. I was wearing only dancing trunks and so I suppose I appealed to him. But he did not appeal tu me. I told him to go away and leave me alone. “T’'ll kiss you, you little devil, right now!” he snapped, and before I knew what he was about, his hands were on my bare shoulders, and he was thrusting his face into mine. I screamed and scratched at his face, but that only seemed to increase his determination the more. “I’m going to kiss you!” he panted, and caught me to him in a fierce embrace. His hand caught my chin and forced my face up- ward to him. He pursed his lips, ready to seize that kiss, when a bulking form suddenly loomed beside him. ‘It was my silent, bashful friend, Eddie Fields. Eddie didn’t say a word. He simply. closed his fist and struck Graham on the jaw.. The crack of the blow was louder than the ham- mering of the carpenter on the uprights. And Graham toppled backward; his head struck the bulge of the piano leg, and he dropped in - a silent, crumpled heap, just at my feet. A scream followed; the piercing scream, of Ruby Summers as she rushed up to her fallen lover, and knelt beside him. She took his bleeding head on her lap and then gazed duinbly into his white, still face. “You've murdered him!” she screamed sud- denly at Eddie Fields. To be continued in the next issue. Damn the Reformers! (Continued from page 12) No. I maintain that pictures are sick and will re- main sick so long as the public wants one thing and the reformers insist upon giving it another, so long as the producer maintains that a beautiful back is worth more than a screen plot, so long as the ex- hibitor in control of a chain of theatres sets himself up as the mouthpiece voicing the wants of his ten thousand or his hundred thousand patrons. But I think the business will show a sign of improvement and get up on its shaky legs. I think the influence of pictures will become sound, more wholsome than at present, when we rid ourselves of the idea that the screen is a device for the amusement of child- hood and realize that its big and its lasting appeal is to the full-grown men and women of the wor! i REX BEACH. The First Time I Ever Saw a Nude Woman (Continued from page 13) without the least concern in the world. I wondered if I would ever reach a state where I could regard the undraped female form divine with the same air of nonchalance that these young men adopted or assumed. ; es | that half hour period I spent most of my time pulling myself together. At last I timidly made a few meaningless scrawls on the paper before me, only to brush them off and begin again and again, trying to build a picture out of my chaotic mental images. Intermission came and the girl climbed down from her stool, coo'ly donned the kimona which lay on the platform, and descended to talk and joke with the students. I sat in my place, however, still timid and embar- rassed and I Ene that I would drop dead if she came near me. Most of the intermission she spent going about here and there, looking at the work of the artists, smiling at this one, admiring that one, until she came to me. She bent over me, looked closely at the paper on which I had made the meaningless marks, and as she did so, I felt her warm breath on my cheek and the faint touch of her body. “This is your first evening here, isn’t asked me. I stammered that I had come from the illustration class to learn the human figure. Gradually, but not that evening, I came to look upon the undraped female figure as a part of an artist’s work, the same as the other eetenth: here girl was Marie Bourget—daughter of an old French family whose chief business in life was trying to maintain themselves decently on the profits of a cheap table d’hote restaurant on West Broadway just below Washington Square. Later I came to know Marie very well. The first night I took Marie home we sat in her father’s little restaurant from 11 o’clock in the evening until 1 o’clock the next morning, sipping red wine while I told her all my hopes for becoming a great artist. ; When acceptance was accorded me by the other fellows in the class—and this took months—I thought Marie took pleasure in being a little kinder to me than usual. I always suspected that William- son, the most influential man in the class, being the best artist, took me on Marie’s say-so. Several times I was elected monitor for a period of a month, and this was the highest honor the class could accord to one of its members. Wie all her sweetness, Marie was also full of the devil. One night we had a “smoker” after hours, and for the occasion we had all chipped in and bought a keg of beer, a bushel of assorted sandwiches and a great pile of pastry. ; The Life Class was on the top floor of the League. On the floor below was the American Artists’ it?” she _ Association which was opening its annual spring exhibition. Men and women were wandering about the halls downstairs in evening clothes. The first night of an A. A.A. exhibition is one of the most important functions among art lovers. : e were holding high jinks at the smoker upstairs. During the festivities, Marie, who was nothing if not curious, clad only in the kimona she donned during intermissions, went to the head of the stairs and peered down at the people assembled in the hall below. At that moment one of the boys gave her a slight:push and sent her running pell mell down the stairs to keep from falling. Her kimona slipt. away from her like an autumn leaf in a breeze, and great was the consternation of the assembled art lovers below when Marie appeared in their midst as nude as the day she was born. But Marie was nothing abashed. She ran upstairs, laughing as if it were the greatest joke in the world. At another smoker at which Marie was hostess, the boys thought it would be a splendid stunt to roll a keg of beer down the marble steps. The feat was accomplished, but as the keg hit each step, it chipped off a piece. Smokers were thereafter for- bidden in the League. Doubtless they have been reinstated since, but during the rest of my term we had no more such festal occasions. One night one of the boys, probably a little the worse for liquor, although it was a rare thing to see an art student come into a class drunk, conceived the brilliant idea of carrying off Marie’s clothes. This was accomplished and as he kept his secret to himself, the class conducted a hunt for Marie’s raiment, which lasted until midnight. One by one they became discouraged and left, until finally I was the only one with Marie, who, now distressed and weeping, hadn’t the least idea how she was going to get out of the building and get home. It was a cold winter’s night, too, and going out on the streets half clothed would have been a dangerous proceeding. We put our wits together and evolved a plan. I was to divide my clothes with Marie. The arrangement was finally affected and when we left the building at about 1 in the morning, we were a grotesque couple. The streets were deserted. and as the sharp wind whistled around the corner of Fifty-seventh and Broadway we were lucky enough to get a passing cab, At Marie’s home, where her parents were worried about her because of the late- ness of the hour, her father and mother were waiting up. They saw the point of the joke, and after a friendly glass of wine, I was on my. way home, dressed as a gentleman should be. I doubt very much if any but a French father and marek would have accepted the situation as they id. Qe night Marie did not keep her appointment with the class. Other models disappointed from time to time, but such a thing from Marie was unheard of. A hasty phone call to the Models’ Club elicited only the information that they had had no word from her or about her for more than a week. They send another model, and with no more than a passing comment on Marie’s unusual conduct, few of the students thought about the matter again. I tried to draw from the model who replaced Marie, but without success. At last, after several vain attempts, I gave it up. Hurriedly leaving the class, I hastened to Marie’s hore. Business in the Chateau Rouge seemed to be progressing as usual. In fact, M. Bourget seemed to be happier than ever before, going about among his guests laughing and jesting. Mme. Bourget sat in her accustomed place behind the cash-desk, chatting with Pierre, a favorite waiter. It was nine-thirty and few customers were in the little dining-room. When M. Bourget spied me he came to my table immediately. : “Ah, Mesieu Alfred,” he beamed. ‘‘What brings you so early from the school of art?” ‘Where is Marie?” I asked with fast beating heart. “She did not keep her appointment tonight.’ I added. ¢ : “You do not know?” he smiled upon me. ‘“To- night Marie is a bride. Allons!”’ “A—a bride,” I stammered, blushing and con- fused. “To be sure,” M. Bourget drew his chair up alongside mine and laid his hand on my arm. “She marries Georges Milliard. He has the La Belle France Restaurant on Broadway. A very fine, rich - man my daughter marries, We wish to give her a grand wedding, but she say no. She will be married quietly and two of her young friends do, what you call it, stand up for her. And so it goes. Will you be my guest in a bottle of vin rouge? We will drink to her who is now Mme. Milliard, my daughter.” ‘Married!’ I mumblingly refused M. Bourget’s olite offer and left the restaurant, sarees | Blindly on my way to the door. My little frien married! Why not? I could not marry her. She could not remain single forever to please me. As I paced Washington Square until late that evening: I thought of nothing but Marie, of her sweet little mannerisms, her grace, her smile— everything that had endeared her to me. She was never to be my wife. That I knew. There was that damnable Puritan b! of mine— and there was my career. Marie was to be my
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M/OWIOHT : Page Twenty Nine inspiration! I was selfish, And as the years pass I am sure that was it. Selfishness. Yes, if Marie is living today she must be the mother of children—a woman of forty—and I—well, I sometimes think of her as I sit working at my easel. Oftentimes, in a day dream, I can see her on my model stand as I saw her that first night at the League. No other model has ever seemed so beautiful. I Never Look Back (Continued from page 14) address and you ride home free of charge. I like your spunk.” She gave me a look of gratitude and I took her over to the East Side where she lived in a tenement on Fifty-sixth Street. You see I got a daughter of my own. Gye a society lady and gentleman left a leather box in my cab andI took it right away up to the office because I didn’t want no one to accuse me of swiping anything. I turned it over to the Lost Articles’ Clerk and he says, “What’s in it?” I couldn’t tell him. He opened the box and it was full of letters, old ones and new ones, all in a lady’s handwriting, all perfumed up like a barber-shop. ‘‘Wow!” he cried when he looked at one of the letters. ‘“‘Here’s a gold mine.” “Gold-mine?” “Sure. These letters are from Mrs. So-and-So to Mr. This-and-That, two names that when you say them in society you are on terra-cotta as the sayin ‘Ya According to the papers, the lady’s husban as been moving heaven and earth to get hold of these letters to cinch his suit for divorce. He’ll pay a million for them.” But, friend, no million was ever paid. No more had the clerk said that than in the door- way appeared the man I had driven. “We left a leather box,” he began when his eye landed on the letters, ‘‘That’s them!” he shouted and he made a grab for them. The clerk shoved them on the floor back of the counter. ‘Not so fast, not so fast,’ he says. ‘You got to identify these and then there’s a small finding fee due.” The man reaches in his pocket and comes up with a revolver, ‘‘Better change your mind,’ he said between his clenched teeth. The clerk handed them over. The man counted them and out he went. That’s the nearest I ever came to getting rich. After that I watched the papers for days to see if hubby ever found the letters but I guess he never did, though he must have known where they were. The Lost Articles’ Clerk was sure wearing a pair of diamond cuff-links he never bought for himself. No sir, I never look back. What for? AsI have ae and can prove if necessary, I have seen every- thing. Did Audrey Munson Take Poison Because of Me? (Continued from page 15) United States) you are bagging his game, as I know this interest is coming through him. While I am there, if you can’t get sufficient data for your serial you can take a trip out here. It will be a vacation for you, and work too. “‘Hastily “Audrey Munson.” I SENT Miss Munson a check to cover her trip to New York and expenses en route, and would give her return expenses following our conference in New York, which was to take place on Saturday. But on Friday, I received the following telegram: “I can’t come less than thirty dollars fare. Send me one hundred dollars, my future will be in to see you but no fare stealing. “AUDREY.” This was hard reading. The most important idea in the communication, I figured, was that Audrey wanted one hundred dollars more of my newspaper's money. It was then that I wrote the most foolish telegram of my young career—the telegram which I fear made Audrey Munson feel that she needed a few mercury tablets; the mysterious telegram which the newspapers commented on, but which, praise and glory, none of them read and therefore none of them published. This is the message I sent: Audrey Munson 7 Ames Atreet, Mexico, Oswego County, N. Y. CAN SEND YOU NO MORE MONEY. EITHER COME ON THAT OR RETURN CHECK AND CALL MATTER OFF. The folly of the message was that I signed my own name, personally, to the thing, did not mention my paper, and on ‘the face of it the telegram was my personal communication to the beautiful artist’s model. The next morning every newspaper in New York was aflame with the story that Audrey Munson had tried to commit suicide! As I read these stories I did not at first believe that there was any connection between our negotia- tions and the young woman’s impulsive plunge jnto tragedy. But when I began to read that a certain telegram was believed to be the cause of all the excitement, I began to ponder. I had sent Audrey a telegram myself. Then the blasting thought came to me, “Suppose the newspapers get hold of that telegram!” Here was the first time in my life that I devoutly hoped my own newspaper didn’t get the facts. For, under my own name, I am not absolutely obscure, and if it were published that Audrey Mun- son swallowed poison because I told her I would send her no more money, there would be a thousand ares wagging about the scandal. hat makes it worse is that I am a respectable married man! De. after day passed, with my apprehension slowly being relieved. Audrey was not talking, except in vague and mysterious generalities. She declared there was a conspiracy against her. She announced that she was sorry she had tried to kill herself, and was glad to know that she was going to live. But as to the contents of that mysterious telegram she was as silent as the Sphinx. For which I shall always be grateful to Audrey. However, I soon found out what she would like todoto me. I received a letter from her, apparently written just before she had swallowed the poison: “Your telegram received this A. M. stating, ‘Can give you no more money; either come on that, or return check and call matter off.’ “I went to the station and found out from our agent that what you sent was not sufficient for the fare. You send me what your corporation owes me and $1.60 what your telegram cost me to send you which should have been unnecessary. If you don’t like the way my mind works, call matters off. I know the cellar well at——(naming our office) and have friends who have brought some of you bulls and bears to terms there. If] write ——(again naming this very celebrated gentleman) you'll go down in the cellar, too! : “‘Hastily, “AUDREY.” And that was the last communication I have received from the beautiful artist’s model, who was so annoyed at me because I would not send her an extra hundred dollars. When I tried to stop pay- ment on the check I had sent her, I found it was too late. She still has the money. When I told all this to the city editor, he puffed reflectively on his pipe and remarked: “These artistic temperaments is hell, ain’t they?’ They sure is! Perils of the Chicago Loop (Continued from page 7) knocking his knees together, the chewing gum seller moves southward. You watch until he boards an Archer Avenue car. Ambling, shambling, he boards it—and is gone. Somewhere from a shadowed doorway Vice laughs tinklingly. Truly it was a clever way to ee something you want. Whose business is it? Has not a man a right to do as he pleases with his own life. ‘Hol’ ‘Hol’ It was oly two weeks ago that oe dumped one hundred and sixty thousands ROSES in the lake. From out of the Loop they went, into the night, loaded into a boat and dumped. Why? To keep the prices up. A young florist in the Loop told the story, “I could have sold them for twenty-five or thirty cents a dozen,” he said, “and made money. So would they. Many peonle could-have had flowers. But no, they would not do it. The Loop has its price for everything. If you do not pay one way, you pay another!” So one hundred and sixty thousand dear, fragrant, velvety petaled, golden hearted roses were thrown ruthlessly into the water of Lake Michigan. Ho! Ho! and Ho! Ho! again. Follow the trail of the scarlet s . Roses are not things for people to love but only to pay large prices for. A rose in the soft little hand of a baby is nothing! Keep ’em out of the cheap vases of the poor. They lose their lure when the r can buy. Roses are made for cut glass and silver and the deadly breath of Lust. “T sometimes wonder,” said the young florist, “why these things are!” Poor lad. Many of us wonder and our wonder grows. To their faces, let us say it and then ask where we are wrong. Does BUSINESS ever inquire of itself what it really is? No, The men who make it know that this is so. That is why girlhood fades in the Loop—or learns to lay on paint hideously, The frothy skirts are a sham. So are the cheery footsteps. Only the wistfulness in the eyes is true. That never dies. Howcana i live on eight dollars aweek? Orten? Or twelve? Fifteen is a big wage now. Follow! Follow! Follow on! Follow the trail of the thread. Still the man who used to paint beautiful pictures and could not sell them, conjures the beauty of light and air and color for the calling of the wistful eyes. He knows the girlhood that each day comes into the Loop to work for its pitiful wage. He knows the women who loll in big Loop Hotels! He calcu- lates in LUST and he knows the commercial value of SACRIFICE. Better than all, he knows that the sales from his store are measured by the depths of wistfulness in the eyes outside. It is not far from the PLACE OF CLOTHES to the CASTLES OF MONEY. Follow the trail of the scarlet thread. Walk west from State Street three short blocks and you are on La Salle, center of FINANCE! Row upon row of offices. Stern-faced men adrift helplessly with the tide of the MARKET. Stocks and bonds and real estate, farms and city lots, everything that is not sold in the PLACE OF CLOTHES. Who makes the MARKET where these stern-faced men so cruelly drift? Ask who really dumped the Roses into the Lake? Who buys up the apple crop and leaves it rotting on the ground so that the poor outside the Loop sha! have no fruit? Why talk about supply and demand? There is enough for all and we all know it. Some- where our world goes awry. The Market goes wrong. Who comforts a man after a hard day on change. as can the girl who works in his office? She who writes all his letters and knows all his secrets? Who shares with him first the mad joy of success? Soft! Home is far away—outside the Loop! Chil- dren are but dim reminders. Day fades. Dusk creeps along the “‘street.’’ Downstairs the motor car waits. Who, of the throngs that pass is curious— or cares? Excuses are easy at home. the Loop—the maddening, surcharged, deadly Loop! Let’s ride out into the Green Peace of the country! Why quibble? There is a low purring engine and a soft cushioned seat. A breeze from the lake and dinner at the end—twenty, thirty miles away. She’s an honest minded, clean souled girl, and she never meant to do the thing that she is doing. It isn’t the conduct her mother taught her nor that she has boasted of. Follow the scarlet trail—the blood red thread that the wanton weaves all through our/lives! An honest girl, but she never rode in a car like this. Besides, who knows what goes on in the Loop? Lying over the telephone is a simple matter. She has only gone to stay the night at the house of a “FRIEND!” 3 So the story runs and all may read, day in and day out, all the years through. There are about so many who go that way. One who did not came into our office yesterday. Truly, the Wanton of the scarlet thread has many forms and faces. Fifteen years that girl had worked and all of it she invested upon the. indly supplication of a man who sat in what was ee to'be a BROKER'S office. One day she left it all there to be invested in Stewart Warner stock. That was all right, if the man had held any of the stock. He didn’t. He did the wisest thing he could do. He went into bankruptcy. The criminal proceedings against him will not give back her money to the girl. She didn’t go home the night of the failure. She walked the streets of the Loop. She paused before the PLACE OF CLOTHES. There was no wist- fulness in her eyes—only bitterness. She, too, felt remorse, but it was different. She felt that her life had been wasted. She envies the girl who rides in the automobile. Rome was seven hundred years being throttled by the wanton whose trail we follow. Outside a cafe on Quincy street a girl waits. The look of the hunter is in her eyes. Her face is pasty with paint. A violet colored frock but half covers her fragile little body. Inside the JAZZ plays unceasingly. Have you noticed it lately—the Let’s get away from
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“Page Thirty aA JAZZ? Already the pathos is creeping in. It is ever that way. Out of awfulness comes honesty and sweetness of life. The men are not wrong who _declare that the future of American music is in Jazz. At first it was savage, primitive. It was the echo of the LUST that lay upon the world, the LUST for Power, for MONEY, the trampling of others under the wheels of the conquerors chariot. t Outside a girl with red slashes for lips waits —for the man that has not kept his word. Her mouth makes a curious bow as it droops at the corners, Her feet are weary from standing on her little French heels so long. . Inside, all the dancers have left the floor. Still the boy and the girl who came last, dance until with one long minor Fast strain the JAZZ crashes out. The pathos is there. Sois the joy. Gone is the vile- ness. Light creeps into the purple overhead. The light of the one pale star goes out in the Dawn from the East! There are Glands that Make You Happy (Continued from page 8) a Ee are glands scattered here and there, whose functions are either little understood or not understood at all. There are other glands whose names or exploits are not mentioned promiscuously in polite society. 4 Glands have the most fun, however, matching one against the other. F For instance, a good, rich mixture of adrenal with a smattering of pitituary produces a man like Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Oscar Wilde was also pitituo-adrenal, after a manner of speaking. Roose- velt was probably adrenal and thyroid. The young man who hangs around pool rooms while his mother takes in washing is doubtless deficient in every department of glands, especially the thyroid. You’d have to light a match to findit. Now, maybe—only just maybe—all this isn’t true. You know the doctors are always finding out some- thing and dragging it in. like the cat drags in a canary. Then, like the cat, they have to drag it right out again because it litters ay the house. Pathological styles change rapidly. We can all remember when the whole world hung suspended by its veriform appendix, as it were, Knives were produced, grindstones were set whirring and the medical fraternity began counting the house. It was to bearich haul. Millions of veriform appen- dices were to be scotched at $300 and up per appen- dix. A man or woman without an appendix on the way out had no social standing. Then, suddenly, the idea perished. Once it was all figured out that insidious germs were slowly but surely wiping out the human race. Later it was discovered that the germs were so oy killing each other that they didn’t have time to kill us, so we stopped worrying about them. And now it’s glands. Old men with one foot in the grave and the other ona banana peel are crowding into the Gland Ward in the hope cl having a last fling at youth. When Harold McCormick, who denied that he passed through a gland operation in Chicago, arrived smiling and jaunty at the French czpital, it was hard to believe that the operation, if it took place, wasn’t successful. Other men well along in years, here and there, are going through the same experience. Once upon a time when a man past fifty went into a hospital we estimated his chances according to statistics. Now we are merely curious. He is likely to kiss the maid, marry a debutante and elope to Baden-Baden on his first day out. There is still considerable guess work about the effect of glands on personality or vitality. Proof is difficult to secure. Maybe, if we wait long enough, interest in glands will wane to a point where we won’t look any-longer for the proof. We’ll be busy looking for something else. Then something will take the place of glands. The writer suggests warts. Their origin has always been shrouded in mystery. Where they come from, why they come, and where they go to after they disappear would make interesting pathological speculation. The childhood theory that warts came from hand- ling frogs has long since been exploded. In fact, I held a frog for three hours once ee Wee a bumper crop of warts to match with the other boys, but nothing came of it. ee It was also said that burying a cent at midnight under an old stump in the woods would cure warts if certain incantations, which I have since forgotten, were gone through with. That never worked cither with the boys that tried it, “The Warts That Determine Sex” or “The Theory of Wart Personality” would make good reading. Unlike the doctors, I charge nothing for advice. Passing through Hell (Continued from page 23) The warden was exasperated beyond expression. His little beady eyes glittered ferociously. “Take him over to the bull pen,”’ he shouted to one of the keepers, “lock him up, I’m going to work on him in a few minutes.”’ The news quickly circulated all over the big rison that Tommy was in the dungeon feigning insanity and everybody waited to see what the outcome would be. The consensus of opinion was that Tommy would be killed if he didn’t give in. No “con” had ever played the “nut” and got away with it. None of them had ever stood up under the punishment of Joliet and if Tommy did he would be the first one in the history of the prison that had ever done so. First they gave him the strap. They put a black cap over his head, tied his feet together, put hand- cuffs on his wrists and then with the aid of a rope and a pulley they pulled him in the air until his toes just barely touched the ground. The strap was a long piece of leather, four or five feet in length, about four inches in width and an inch or an inch and a half thick. There were a number of rivets in the end of it, the rivets were put there for a purpose, to break the skin. They bit Tomy, thirty-five blows the first day. Then they threw him in the dungeon. The next morning they took him out and repeated the dose. They kept this up for about a week during which time Tommy never as much as let a whimper out of him. He just laughed and kept up a silly, sense- less chatter. They beat him and beat him until his hips and back were raw. “Well, have ya got enough, going to quit this bug- house business?” the warden would ask after each beating. Tommy merely grinned and giggled and passed nonsensical remarks so the warden continued on with the strapping. Eventually he saw that he wasn’t making any progress with the strap. in consequence of which he decided to try the paddle, which was a little more brutal and a little more painful than the strap. The “bull pen” had various utensils of torture within its confines all of which were applied to ‘ommy. The paddle treatment was handed out in the following manner. First they stripped him naked. Then they fastened his ankles to the floor with the aid of sharp clamps which would cut into his skin if he moved. When his ankles were tied they made Tommy bend over a big barrel. His wrists were fastened to the floor on the other side of the barrel. When he was securely fastened they got out the paddle which had been soaking in boiling hot water and started to beat him withit. Between every blow the paddle was dipped in hot sand. They dipped it in, the hot sand so that it would intensify the agony. The paddle tore and lacerated estas hide until his body looked like a piece of iver. murmured, he just laughed and went on with his silly remarks. The endurance of the man was heroic; it seemed that he was devoid of feeling and that ne more they punished him the more he could stand. They gave him the pee for ten days and after each day they would hang him up at night by the wrists, hung him in the air until his toes just dangled on the concrete floor. The longer he hung the tighter the handcuffs became, because his wrists began to swell up to a huge size. The handcuffs were so tight that the blood couldn’t circulate so of course this added to the pain. Ultimately his entire body lost all sense of feeling, a black, im- penetrable gloom swept over him and when they would come into the “bull pen” in the morning to let him down he was unconscious. There now remained but one other unspeakable savagery that they could inflict upon him, and if he could stand up under that one he might win out. The ‘water cure” the most wantonly cruel and fiendish torture that the mind of man ever devised. The thumb screw and the wrack of the inquisition is not to be compared with the “water cure,” believe me when I say this, J have undergone it and I know what J’m talking about. As a matter of personal knowledge I know of four convicts that the “water cure” killed. I know of But Tommy never yelled, no, he never. ea ea sexcral whom it made rip-roaring maniacs out of. I have seen big, strong, desperate fellows whom it has broken and crushed as one would a flower in one’s hand. The “water cure” is the last word in torture! The “‘water cure” was the thing that the warden applied when all the rest of the tortures failed. It always got the results that the warden wanted. “T thought that it was the finish when I heard him say that he was going to give me the water cure,” Tommy told me, ‘but T made up my mind that I was going through with it. I had stood so much punishment that I couldn’t afford to quit.” The “water cure” was a unique method of tor- ture. As usual the prisoner was stripped naked. Then he was seated in a wooden bath tub, a tub that is constructed pretty much like the tub in your home. At both ends of the tub there were small steel clamps into which the wrists and ankles were fastened, fastened so securely that if you moved a fractional part of an inch the clamps cut into the skin and you endured the most excruciating pain. Lengthwise across the top of the tub was a long board, in the centre of which was a hole and through which the head of the prisoner was shoved. This covering was fastened to the sides of the tubs with five or six force screws. It was also adjustable and could be made to fit any size man. hen the prisoner was seated in the tub and all fastenings were tightened up the head was the only part of his body that could be seen. Then the Hell began. The official torturer would don a rubber coat, hat and boots, turn on the hose and shoot it straight into the unprotected face of the victim. After a minute or two of this you begin to gasp for breath, you open your mouth and when you open it they turn the hose into the mouth. It gurgles and hisses and foams right down to your lungs. You try to close your mouth, but you can’t—all you can do is choke and gasp and strangle yourself. Finally it knocks you out— your face turns purple and blue and the blood comes streaming out of your nose and mouth. When you become unconscious they stop for a moment until you recover and then they start all over again! The “water cure’ knocked most of the front teeth out of Tommy’s mouth; it tore and lacerated the roof of his mouth and the inside of his jaws. Hecouldn’t talk, couldn’t articulate distinctly after they gave him the first dose, but he still grinned and still went on with his maniacal yammering. “He’s shamming, I tell you, he’s shamming,” the doctor protested. “Keep it up, he’ll break after a while.” ‘ So the prison doctor called in other physicians from the outside. Then they all made another examination of Tommy, submitted him to every test known to the profession, all of which indicated that he was sane. They were unanimous in that belief, not one dissenting voice. “Well,” the warden said, “I’ve got one more hurdle to put upin front of him; if he goes over that one why I’m through, off he goes to Bloomington.” The “one more hurdle” that he was referring to _was the most hellish piece of torture that was ever inflicted upon a human being, nobody but a fiend with a dirty, black heart and a twisted soul and a perverted mind could have thought of it! He heated two pokers, two stove pokers, to a sizzling, white, blistering heat and then poked them through the bars at Tommy who stood there with a woebegone, far-away look in his eyes. Tommy grabbed the pokers and held.on to them, held on with the death-like grip of the maniac, held on and laughed while the pokers burned and singed the flesh clean through to the bones in his hands, He never gave any intimation of pain though he was suffering the tortures of the damned. He just laughed and went on with his senseless jabbering as though he had nothing more than two sticks in his hands. “He’s as crazy as a bed bug,” the warden shouted at the prison doctor who witnessed this piece of deviltry, ‘don’t tell me that that guy ain’t nutty. He goes to Bloomington to-morrow.” the next day Tommy was transferred to Bloom- ington and labelled “Insane.” He was the first man that had ever beaten Joliet, but Good God! how many human beings could have stood up under the tortures that he underwent! | Twenty-four hours after his arrival at the asylum in Bloomington he made his escape. He served exactly thirty-five days of his twenty-five year sentence. He burglarized a hundred banks over the world, stole approximately a million dollars and finally his sightless soul was shocked over the border into eternity by the lightning of legal justice. He “cashed in” in the electric chair at Sing Sing about three years ago.
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Thirty Years in Tin Pan Alley (Continued from page 23) Andy grinned and shook his head. “I guess we’d have signed a contract to turn out five hundred songs for that money,” he replied. And if you have followed me from the beginning you'll know that I might have been willing to write a thousand songs for five hundred dollars. Beauty and the Beast (Continued from page 6) which men no longer win and hold their women by brute force. At a fight women revert to those primitive instincts which were theirs thousands of years ago when the progenitors of the race fought to the death for a mate and the woman watched as they fought, obediently ready to follow the victor when the combat was over. On the night of the Leonard-Tendler battle I had a particularly striking example of this truth. Box- ing matches and clothes are my two feminine ex- travagances and if I could not afford both a choice between them would be a hard problem. In conse- quence I had a ringside seat for the Leonard battle for which I willingly paid the half of a week’s salary. My companion was a girl I shall call Maisie because that isn’t her name. She is secretary to our office chief and is the most demure, efficient, ST nesslike little person in our organization. I don’t know whether or not there ever has been any man in her life but I do know there isn’t anyone for whom she cares now. She lives with her mother in an uptown apartment, avoids gay parties and Broad- way’s white lights and except for her cigarettes hasn’t a fault that would bring a blush to the cheek of even an old-fashioned grandmother. She and I went alone to the Leonard-Tendler fight. It was Maisie’s first prize-fight. Our seats were directly behind Leonard’s corner, Behind us was an exquisitely beautiful girl, easily recognized from her pictures which filled the Mr ri a few weeks ago, ae she abandoned her millionaire father’s home and eloped with an old flame on the eve of a wedding that was heralded as a high social event. I wondered if the restless, ner- vous, plainly-embarrassed man beside her was the groom. I imagine he was but he needn’t have been ill at ease about ‘pelea par his bride to a prize- fight. The fire of expectancy I saw in her eyes was sufficient proof that she was no novice at the ring- side; plainly, experience had taught her the thrill of seeing men’s perfectly conditioned bodies straining and grappling in physical battle; as I did, she knew erfectly well what she had come there to enjoy emininely. In the intensity of my own interest I had, for the moment, forgotten Maisie, who had yet to learn all this that I knew. “Well, what do you think of it?” I asked her. “Interesting, possibly, but scarcely worth the many hard-earned dollars our seats cost—at least not to me,” she answered. J smiled to myself. My demure little friend was pronouncing judgment upon the play before the curtain rose. I had seen Leonard fight before and liked him even as I had liked Carpentier. Therefore he was aa favorite—my chosen man in the battle that followed. Almost instantly, it seemed, Tendler’s love buried itself in Leonard’s stomach and, his face eing toward me, I saw his wince of pain. His opponent’s fist, with lightning swiftness, rose to his face and when they stepped back from each other’s arms Leon rd wiped away little streams of blood that flowed from a cruel cut upon his cheek. I bit my lips and murmured inarticulate encour- agement and regret. Blows were given and taken faster than the eye could see or lips count. Once again the tide of battle was going against my man, The advantage clearly was with Tendler, and m, panel clenched hands and quick, panting br. at trayed the desperate sincerity of my partisanship. Not until the round was over had I time for even a thought of Maisie. When I did look at her even I was shocked by the change which had come over her. Her usually soft eyes glittered and burned with an inner, leaping flame. Her breast heaved and her teeth were clenched until her face was hard in lines call tram ruthlessness. “He’s winning! He’s beating him! He’s killing him! I hope he does. Oh, how I hove he does,’ she whispered again and again from between her t-pressed lips, “But. he isn’t,” I denied in amazement. “The other man has the advantage so far. Didn’t you see that he has cul my Leonard’s cheek cruelly?” Maisie turned upon me like a wild thing and in her eyes I glimpsed all the fury that woman may feel toward woman when a man has divided them. “Yes, I did see,” she exclaimed in a voice so unlike Maisie’s I scarcely coyld believe I heard her speak- ing. “I saw the blow. I saw the blood. It was glorious to me,” she paused to give her words double emphasis, “because your OTHER man is my OWN man.” I was saying good-night before the door of her apartment house in Manhattan before either of us mentioned the fight again. Maisie stepped close to me and laid her hand on my arm in what I knew was a mute appeal for tolerance between us. “T still think Tendler won,” she said. ‘I’m sorry, Cjara—for everything. I didn’t know anything could make the girl J thought I was like what I know now I really am,” She hesitated. I saw the pulse in her throat quicken and throb and I saw unwilling surrender to’ an irresistible temptation flare back in her eyes. “The next time you go toa fight take me, please,” she begged, and then before I could reply, ran from me with a half-choked sob and was gone. When I reached my boarding house I told my younger sister I had been to a theatre. I don’t want her ever to see q ring fight. They mean too much, far, far too much, to a girl. Which, in con- clusion, is the reason we go. This isn’t a pleasant revelation of what girls see and feel at a’prize-fight. It isn’t pleasant because it is truthful. Little Laughing Thing (Continued from page 19) was reading quietly in the library downstairs, the silence was torn by a ghastly scream. The man, hesitating a moment, heard a second scream and then rushed out into the hall. Gertrude, in a bewildering negligée, almost threw herself down the stairs and into Norman’s arms. Cowper came hurrying from the basement; Ruth and Mrs. Bracy stood at the top of the stairs. For some moments, Gertrude could do nothing but cling hysterically to Norman. Then: “Oh, oh! The old woman! Norman, the old woman!” “What, darling? What do you mean, what-—?” “An old woman. Dreadful! Dreadful! An old woman in a crinoline, in my room, Norman! And— I can’t tell you! No face! Do you understand? No face—only a mouth that gibbered at me!” “Now be quiet,’”’ Norman soothed her hysteria. “Be quiet, Gertrude, and then tell me about it.” She pulled herself together, although the pretty face was still expressive of terror. Then she told him, including the servants. It took many words, but she had been sitting in her room at her mirror, when she heard something. Turning, she had perceived the horror—a little old woman, the ghost of a little old woman, who had no face and yet a mouth; and this mouth had: “‘gibbered” at her. Screaming for help, Gertrude had dashed past this thing, when it had disappeared, and Gertrude had come rushing down to Normau. Of course Norman questioned her. The thing was absurd. She was overwrought, nervous—and such like platitudes of comfort. Besides, granted a host, and there was no such thing, how could there e no face and yet a mouth? “I can’t explain, I can’t explain,” Gertrude moaned, as she sat firmly on Norman’s knee. ‘All the same it was—and I am terrified of ghosts, I wish we had never bought the house! You would do it,” and she buried her face on his shoulder. He soothed her finally, but before she went to bed, Gertrude went over it all again with Mrs. Bracy and Ruth. Fortynately, neither of the women believed in ghosts. It was only that Mrs. Allison was all upset! Mrs. Bracy knew there were no such things. So presently the household retired for the night. Still, in the days that followed, there was much talk on ghostly matters. Such names as Sir Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle were often mentioned at Junch or dinner, The servants die among them- eke tae it was a pity Mrs, Allison had got all upset That evening, Gertrude was sewing—something ite, “What’s that—a dress or something?” asked Norman. Gertrude shook her head. whim of a silly little girl.” She went to bed early, and that night there was no ghost scare. And the next evening, Gertrude sewedindustriously until ten o’clock. “Just a whim—the teeing a nana “Pa. (4 Thirt One “Therel” she said triumphantly. “I finished it.” “What’s all this?” Norman asked indulgently, looking up from a book. “An idea of mine, you old bear. don’t want to give up this house.” “And what is that white thing got to do with it?” She pouted deliciously. ‘Well, you see! suppose I am silly. You, all of you—you, and Cowper and Mrs. Bracy and everybody, say that I can’t have seen anything—anything, you know— dreadful. The—the old woman. Oh, I can’t talk about it! But I thought, if it is imagination, if you would help me, I could teach myself—not to be a You see, I silly.” She spread out the white garment on which she had been working. “It looks like a shroud—or a fancy dress costume,” commented Norman. “You see it has a hood,’ Gertrude explained, “that goes all over the head and face. Now Norman, don’t laugh at me, and you are not to say anything to the servants. Promise!” “I promise,” he answered bravely, though his. eyes were smiling. “Well, will you help me—conquer myself? Don’t argue about it, Norman, but I am going up to bed now. I want you to put this thing on, so that you look. like a ghost. Then you come softly upstairs into my room—when I don’t know when you are coming. When I see something white coming in, one part of me will be frightened, but the other part will be telling me that I am a little silly and that it’s only you. I think this might help me, and I don’t want to give up the house, so will you do this, Norman?” She sat on the arm of his chair, and he smiled up at her, and told her she wasa goose girl, but that, if it would help her, he would do it. Presently, she went slowly upstairs, leaving the white, hooded garment on a chair beside Norman. She entered her room, and closed the door. From a drawer in her desk, Gertrude took out a photograph of Trevor Forbes. She looked at it yearningly, and held it against her bosom, Then she kissed it and replaced it in the desk. She undressed quickly, and slipped a negligée over her nightdress. Then she unlocked a drawer in her bureau, and her hand held a small revolver, She did this mechanically, and quite calmly. She placed a wicker arm chair, so that it faced the door, and, ever calmly, she sat down—to wait. Her smile was an unpleasant one, as so she sat, waiting. It was unnecessary, she told herself, for a clever woman to give up anything. Anyone could have anything they wanted. She wanted Trevor Forbes, and she wanted Norman’s money. By these means, she could have both. There would be no danger—just a little trouble. No ye! would convict after the servants had testified as to her terror of ghosts. The world would merely blame her husband for Bampees a stupid trick upon a nervous wife—a trick that would have cost him his life. So calmly, unemotionally, Gertrude waited— pee urge to see her was greater than Trevor Forbes could resist. It was eleven o’clock, and really too late for a conventional call. He would say, then, that he had been to a party in an artist’s studio, and so had ventured to Sep in for a drink and a cigarette, Gertrude would probably arrange so that they might have a moment together. Norman was quite cordial. Gertrude was tired, and had gone to bed early. Normea hospitably, as he “Say when,” said poured out ies tee! “When!” smiled Trevor. What a bore! Now he would have to stop and talk for a bit. Then his eye eenene the white garment. ‘‘What’s that?” he asked, “This?” chuckled Norman, as he held it in his hand. “Well, I only promised not to tell the ser- vants. But Gertrude wouldn’t mind you knowing, as you are such good pals.” He went on to explain. “So I think I’ll play my little part now,” he con- chided. But Trevor Forbes stopped him. If he could use this as an excuse, there might be a chance for a stolen kiss, ‘No, let me!”’ Trevor be; than you, and I shall cha her. Let me.” ed. ‘I can do it better er so that it may cure - FEW moments later, and Trevor Forbes softl opened the door of Gertrude’s room, while Norman stood outside. There was a blinding flash and the report of a revolver, as Trevor Forbes staggered, and then crumpled up, a dead , on the carpet.
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How A New Kind of Clay Remade My Complexion in 30 Minutes For reasons which every woman will understand, I have concealed my name and identity. I have asked the young woman whose pictures you see here to pose for me, so that you can see marvelous makes one’s complexion in one short half haur. exactly how the COULD hardly believe my eyes. Just thirty minutes before my face had been blemished and unsightly; my skin had been coarse, sal- low and lifeless. Now it was actually trans- formed. I was amazed when I saw how beautiful my complexion had become—how soft its tex- ture, how exquisite its coloring. Why, the blem- ishes and impurities had been lifted right away, and a charming, smooth, clear skin revealed underneath! What was this new kind of magic? You see, I never did have a pretty com- plexion. My skin is very sensitive. It always used to be so coarse and rough that I hated to use powder. Sometimes pimples and eruptions would’ appear over night—and as for blackheads, I never could get rid of them! To be perfectly frank with you, I tried every- thing there was to try. ‘I greeted each new thing with hope—but hope was: soon abandoned as my skin became only more harsh and color- less. Finally I gave up everything in favor of massage. ut suddenly I found that tiny wrinkles were beginning to show around the eyes and chin—and I assure you I gave up massage mighty quick. Wasn’t there anything that would clear my - complexion, that would make it soft and smooth and firm? Wasn't there anything I could do without wasting more time and more money? It was very discouraging, and I was tempted more than once to give it ap In fact, on one very disappointing occasion I firmly resolved never to use anything but soap and water on my face again. But then some- thing very wonderful happened—and, being a woman, I promptly changed my mind! Why I Changed My Mind Did you know that the outer layer of the skin, called the epidermis, is constantly dying and being replaced by new cells? I didn’t—until I read. a very remarkable announcement. That announcement made me change my mind. It explained, simply and clearly, how blackheads, pimples, and nearly all facial eruptions are caused when dead skin and bits of dust clog the pores. Impurities form in the stifled pores—and the results are soon noticeable. The announcement went on to explain how scientists had discovered a marvelous clay, which, in only one application, drew dust, dirt and other impurities and harmful accumulations to the sur- face. This Domino Complexion ey, in only a half hour, actually lifted away the blemishes and the impurities. And when it was removed the skin beneath was found to be soft, smooth, clear and charming! Can you blame me for wanting to try this wonderful discovery on my own blemished complexion? My Extraordinary Experience I won't bore you with details. Suffice to say that I applied the Domino Complexion Clay I had read about to my face one evening at nine o'clock and settled myself comfortably for a half hour of reading. Soon I was conscious of a cool, drawing sensation. In a few moments the clay on my face had dried into a fragrant mask. And as it, dried and hardened there was a wonderful tingling feeling. But discovery re- I could actually feel the millions of tiny pores breathing, freeing them- selves of the impurities that had stifled them, giving up the bits of dust and the accumulations that had bored deeply beneath the surface. At nine-thirty I removed the Domino Complexion Clay, and, to my utter astonishment, found that I had a brand new complexion! Hidden beauty had actually been revealed! Every blackhead had vanished; the whole texture of the skin had been transformed into smooth, clear, deli- cately-colored beauty my extraordinary perience with Domino Complexion Clay. It accomplished in a half hour what other prep- arations had not ac- complished in. years. It is because it did it for me, because I actually had this won- derful experience, that I consented to write this story for publication. Domino House Made This Offer To Me The formula from which the amazing Domino Complexion Clay is made was discovered by the chemists of the Domino House. I have been asked to state here, at the end of my story, that Domino House will send without. any money in advance a $3.50 jar of Domino Complexion Clay to any- one who reads my story. If I would write my experience with the marvelous new Domino Complexion Clay for publication the Domino House agreed to accept only $1.95 for a $3.50 jar from my readers. You, as my reader, should not miss this opportunity. I am sure that the marvelous Domino Complexion Clay will do for you what it has done for me. It is guaranteed to do so, and a special deposit of $10,000 in the Producers and Consumers Bank of Philadelphia backs this guarantee. Your money will be promptly refunded if you are not delighted with results and return what is left of Domino Complexion Clay within 10 days. Send No Money It is not necessary to send any money with the coupon. Just pay the postman $1.95 (plus few cents postage) when the jar of Domino Complexion Clay is in your hands. You will have the same extraordinary experience that I had—and yeu will be grateful to me for agreeing to write this Teng ut I advise you to act at once before the special offer is withdrawn and Domino Complexion Clay is once more placed at its regular price. ( By taking advantage of this special low-price offer, and sending direct to the manufacturers, you get Domino Complexion Clay freshly compounded, the very day your Three simple steps —and the com- plerton 1s made clear, smooth and codianiye beauti- ONLY $195 oath Ws a If You order arrives. And you pay only $1.95, plus few cents postage, et at Once although products of a similar nature, and without many of the advantages of Domino Complexion Clay, are sold re; ly from $2.50 to $3.50. ut Acco! ent, I will postman only $1.95 (plus postage). eb this special. . ced price, IT am Although I am benefiting y, red Persharing i ter it the wtatanieed,peivioge # turing delighted with the resuits in every way. I am to be the sole judge, NAMOs sc osoc ances canoes st eae ieee ieuewbslnnet esse vmecteds AGGPOGS. 6 cece ener e ner enseeseeeseensraseereereress UGE ice sn io aig.pre, bs are. gre sielolalwsolbinia erelre State. If you wish, you may send money with coupon.