Midnight 0106 September 23 1922
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(id the Parson Love the Naughtiest Girl ? MIQNIGHT. ‘a 23, 1922 | A Macfadden Publication 1O* Caen much Is @ Stolen Kiss Worth? Np Sa) (pr (fo Sold to the Devil CA new mystery Serial Do Women make the Best Bootleggers id £500 in Prizes for Midnight Thrillers /
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Midnight Thrills are Pouring In “necking parties’’—so many people have them. And everybody who has had a thrill at midnight, it would appear, has sent it to us. Our thrill editor’s hair has become as stiff as wire from the exertion of standing straight up on his head from morning to night, as he wades through his mail. O*: would think that midnight thrills were as common as Don’t forget! in your thrill at once. There are EIGHTEEN PRIZES! Your chance is as good as anybody else’s. Send Perhaps YOU will win the first prize of two hundred and fifty dollars. On page 22 of this issue of MIDNIGHT we are printing a few of those entries that we consider really thrilling. necessarily. If you have a real thrillee—SEND IT IN! And remember—NO MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED WORDS. Other details and conditions of the contest appear below. $250.00 for the best adventure. $100.00 for the next best adventure. $ 50.00 for the third best adventure. 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 a factor. 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 There are plenty of others just as thrilling, so we don’t mean that those we print will win a prize $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. voumel MIDNIGHT _ numero CONFESSIONS Why George M. Cohen Pushed Fanny Brice Off the Stage -- - Daughter of aMurderer - - - - eee = z The Life Story of Veronica, Queen of New York’s Moulin Rig ADVENTURE My Greatest Midnight Thrill - - - - MYSTERY A Midnight Seance with Jazzy Spooks - Sold to the Devil ~hle agence = ls Charged With His Own Murder - - - FEATURES Burning the Candle at Both Ends—An editorial by Bernarr Macfadden - - - - - - - - - - = - - - = = How I Entertained My Small Town Sweetheart in New York - - Did the Parson Love the Naughtiest Girl in America? - French Heels on American Bootlegs - - - - - Dogs or Children—Which? - - - - - - - - Who Has the Most Beautiful Neck on bromiwaye pictorial feature- - - - - - - - - - - - - = - 16and17 Saving Souls by Jazz, one of the Cub Reporter Series - - - - 19 How Much Is a Stolen Kiss Worth? = - Ss bes te ce ae ae ed, Midnight—A short story - - - - - - - - - - - - - 23 Published weekly by the MIDNIGHT USN, COMPANY, INC., 119 West 40th Street, New York, N. Y., 66 North Michigan Boulevard, Chicago, Ill. Edwin E. Zoty , President, ‘Pee oS Norns Secreti ntered as second class matter Ree 4th, 1922, at the post office at New York, N. was under the act of March 3rd, 1879. Subscription $5.00 a year. In Canada— single copy, 15 cents. 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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“Page Three SEPTEMBER. > nO w40 Se reat ‘OMONI GH T. a He. we ajo iy yy Burning the Candle’ at Both Ends ‘By Bernarr CMacfadder’ IFE is a strange experience. If it seems common-place to 1 you, the fault is yours. You possess a body that is so extraordinary in its workings that you cannot sdlve many of the mysteries as- sociated there with. You may be the world’s greatest psycho- logist or even an anatomical and physiological expert without a peer but you would still find within yourself much that is mysterious. It is our inability to appreciate the marvels of our human machine that causes the burning of the candle at both ends. Victims of this mistake make pleasure the one object of their lives and the very thing that they seek, ultimately evades them. The joyous life that is wholesome and stable must come indirectly. You cannot seek delight for itself alone. We must have other objects in view. You find real, lasting joy in work that is well.done, in Be sponsibilities that have been carefully assumed. But if our one object in life is to secure rewards (pleasures) that we have not earned, proper appreciation is lacking. What which seems so attractive often turns into dead sea fruit. Pleasure for its own sake leads to certain disaster. Suppose you.were unfortunate enough to have money “galore.” A rich father has been good to you. There is no necessity for work. You do not have to earn a living. - And your one object thereafter is pleasure. there, everywhere seeking it. Can you imagine the unprofitable character of such a life. And as the ordinary jyleasures of life begin to cloy your appetite you turn hither and thither. You go here, Alcoholic stimulants, gambling, | i Sw “Th E — he ou in your search for the thrill st began this life of over-indul- excesses of every sort, attra that came to you when yo gence. A chase after pleasure Of this sort will lead one from bad to worse. The candle of life will soon burn out all your zest for wholesome things. it its ree, And when you tufri to the dregs of human life for excitement you are travelling the downward path at a rapid rate. You will still have ‘‘money to burn.” Perhaps you have had so much youcould not spend it all. But what is money worth under such circumstances? It will not relieve your pain-racked body. It-will not clear your brain of the seething unrest that has come to you because of your abnormal habits. Infact, it has been a curse, the character of which could not us fittingly described. In honest work a poor victim of this sort can find a pos- sibility of salvation. Work that has an aim in view. Work that will bring achievements that are of some value to human life. But there are also men who dissipate in work. They become engulfed with the enthusiasm for making money or getting ahead and the bodily machine is forgotten. They work until they become dull, deadened human plodders. They too are burning the candle at both ends and they have to pay the same penalty. as those who dissipate in pleasure. Make your life worth while. Balance your activities. Per- haps, like a steam engine, you need a governor. The governor in your case is intelligence properly applied to all the problems of life. Ra > Vit, By
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The awakening—just af- ter a hysterical epi- sode Miss Ramos was hypno- tized by Dr. Bowers. moment of when Hyslop’s good-night. The rocking table has ended its occult dance. AS spirit photography been proved at last / An amazing mystery js baffling all the wise men of New York,—an enigma so sinister, so uncanny, so improbable that most hard-headed skeptics are frankly puzzled. The newspapers came out one morning with the astounding report that a ghostly portrait had been produced of the most famous of ‘all the American spook hunters,—the late Professor James H. yslop, of the American Society for Psychic Research, For years spirit pictures have been the ie of international argument and dispute. Sir hur Conan Doyle showed many of them when he toured this country. But always a prcearebes would ae up = show how they could have been produced y trickery. But here was a new wonder—produced under such circumstantes that apparently made fraud impos- sible, under conditions, indeed, laid down by Doyle himself as being final and conclusive. The true story of the weird seance which produced that miracle picture has never been told before. | was present at the meeting and I am going to tell the whole story, here and now, eee fearlessly, at whatever cost that recital may entail. It all began early in June with the formation of a small group known as the New York Committee for Psychic Science and Philosophy, This committee was composed of Major and Mrs. Scott, who have just returned from a three year sojourn in Bombay, Calcutta, Simla and other famous cities of India; sobert Thomas Hardy, a literary agent; Major Manley Ramus, Mr. Charles Geiger, Dr. Bowers and the. author, Practically everyone present had devoted more or less time to an investigation of spirit raps, mys- terious messages written upon slates, trances and the materialization of ghostly forms. The purpose of the organization was merely to continue such examinations under a loose form or organization, and within half an hour after the meeting assembled the lights in the room were lowered and the little group of men and women were gathered around the table, their hands resting lightly upon the shining oak surface waiting in hushed expectancy for a demonstration. It came. The table gave a leap into the air as if it were alive. It rocked back and forth, tilted, turned and ambled from one room to another. Instantly questions were put to it to which replies were made with loud and sonorous knocks. These knocks seemed to come from the very heart of the table. “Ts a spirit inthis table?’’ was the first question. The knocks sounded briskly the spirit equivalent for “yes.” Then presently came an amazing announcement spelled out laborously in the old-fashioned ghostly code by which one of the sitters pronounces the alphabet and the table raps at the appropriate letter. FIND HYSLOP FACE ON SPIRIT PICTURE Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, chiet investigator of the Psychical Rese@rch Society, yesterday identified a ghostly face appearing on an ordinary flash- light photograph as that ef the late Prof, James E, Hyslop of Columbia, the founder and for many years Presi- dent of the Psychical Research So- ciety. In the photograph, taken last Mon- day at a meeting of twelve physicians and writers interested in spirit phe- nomena, in the home of Dr. Edward F. Bowers, No. 255 West End Ave- nue, a trained nurse, Miss Marie Haviland of No. 1603 Gravesend Ave- nue, Brooklyn, is shown lying on a couch surrounded by those who took part in the experiment. Majo: Carl M. Ramus, a physician at Ellis Island,. is shown in the group. In the upper left hand corner of the pho- tograph appears the faint outline of a face. This Dr. Prince at once de- clared was Dr. Hyslop. “IT cannot positively affirm this to be a material manifestation of Dr. Hyslop without full investigation, which I intend to make,’’ said Dr. Prince yesterday, {t‘but this photo- graph bears a striking resemblance to him, It is the kind of a picture which a spirit should make, and‘if jt {s a take, it is a most adroit one.’’ The above clipping, from the New York World of August 19th, set all New York wondering what grandpa would say when he came back and discovered his crayon portrait had disappeared from the parlor. ‘I am the spirit of Hyslop,” was the astonishing message received. But being hard-bojled skeptics we proceeded to test this ghostly boast. We demanded proof of the spirit’s identity. How could he assure us that he was Hyslop? We demanded to know the date of his birth, the date of his death and other intimate details of the Hyslop family. To all of these, replies came with astonishing promptness. High in hope, we consulted ‘‘Who’s Who’ the next morning and found that in every particular except one, the spirit had failed, If the ghost of Hyslop were in that table then the old professor had an astonishingly bad memory. He couldn’t even remember his birthday or the day that he died. We decided that the spook that called himself Hyslop was a liar. ; It was at this time that I received a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stating what, in his estimation, was a test condition for spirit photographs. There had been so much in the newspapers regarding spirit photography that we were all anxious to try some experiments, and if we did try them we meant to perform the experiments under rigid test conditions. Accordingly the following steps were pursued ;— Mr. Hardy, Mr. van der Weyde, a well-known New York photographer, and myself went to Wil- loughby's Photography Shop on West 32nd Street
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The miracle picture which hasastonished the greatest savants of America. Hyslop’s face is distinctly re- vealed in the upper left - hand corner. How did it get there? Mr. Frikell declares he will find that out. While the editors do not, personally, care to vouch for the authen- ticity of the spirits and photographed, neither do they wish to cast the cloud of doubt upon them. At any they felt that, owing to the current herein evoked rate, widespread interest in the subject, it would be interesting to pre- sent the matter to the readers of MIDNIGHT and permit them to form their own con- clusions and purchased a set of camera plates sealed in their original package. Agee the seal of these plates we wrote our names so that any disturbance of that paper would be instantly manifest in the broken pencil lines. These plates remained in my possession under lock and bey until the night of the seance. An interesting group of people were gathered together in the laboratory of Dr. Bowers at 255 West End Avenue on the night which gave birth to this astonishing and baffling mystery. Present in the room as guests of Dr. Bowers were Major and Mrs. Scott, Major Ramus, Mr. Geiger, Mr. Hardy, Miss Eleanor Ramos, a novelist of distinction; her sister, Miss Marie Haviland, a trained nurse, Miss Ashfield, Mr. W. Adolph E. Roberts, a poet, Mr. van der Weyde and his camera, and myself. he astounding proposal by mears of which we meant to obtain, if possible, a spirit photograph struck the company with surprise. It was our intention to sypaorize someone, place them under a megmeric spell and send them into a trance, deeper arid deeper upoe the astral plane, and then while the spirit might be leaving the prostrate and uncon- scidus body, Mr. van der Weyde would explode a flashlight—and we would see what we would see. With great courage, Miss Haviland agreed to be tHe subject, yielding herself to the mesmeric passes and hypnotic suggestions of Dr. Bowers, who is an old and practiced heirophant in the hypnotic mysteries. Before this was done, however, I insisted that the most rigid control be obtained over the photographic apparatus. Mr. van der Weyde, as the photographer, was barred from any direct handling of the plates which I had brought to the meeting. They were introduced into the holders under whe observation of Major Scott. The camera was minutely examined. When all was in readiness the lights were dimmed. Miss Haviland lay down on a couch and Dr. Bowers, standing over her, began making magic passes across her eyes and down her young form, speaking softly, almost inaudibly, murmuring invitations to sleep. A great sigh escaped her. Her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her body seemed to grow rigid—then suddenly out of her mouth issued a stream of jargon in strange guttural intonations with fugitive snatches of some wild and barbaric melody. “She is talking Roumanian!” cried one. “No! No!” cried another excitedly; ‘‘it’s a gypsy dialect spoken in the south of Spain.” Before the matter could be decided the jargon ceased. The girl lay utterly still and Dr. Bowers lifted his hand and whispered to her:— “You will not be startled at anything that happens.” Hyslop announcing hie presence. The first movement of the hedvy dining- room table as it be- gan its wild career around the room. He lowered his hand, which was the signal to Mr. van der Weyde. The room was tocked with an explosion of the flash-light cartridge and a great lume of white smoke curled toward the ceiling, as if it were itself a ghost. . Not an eyelid of the entranced girl fluttered, nor was her pulse accelerated by so much as a fraction. She lay apparently dead to the world. Dr. Bowers slowly withdrew the influence which had seemed to paralyze her and she woke up dazed but otherwise undisturbed. There were other experiments that evening. Miss Ramos was hypnotized and while in a trance cried out some exceedingly dramatic accusations. If this were a story of hypnosis, the experiences of Miss Ramos would require columns of description, but I have time only to tell of this amazing spirit portrait. It was the picture taken of Miss Haviland at the moment when she was deepest in het slumber that produced this uncanny phenomenon. The plates remained that night in the possession of Major Scott. he fext morning they were develo; under his supervision. Yet with ap- parently every avenue of fraud closed and barred, with every precaution taken to prevent trickery or ractical jest, with all the rigid conditions demanded by skeptics thoroughly iniposed, the first print that (Continued on Page 30)
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age Sik How! entertained my small town This is an unfinished story. We are oing to ask you to finish it yourself. he end depends upon the letter Susan wrote to John. Will she write him that she will marry him and go back to the old home town to live? Or will she call their engagement off and marry Rawlison? There’s the problem. Now what did Susan write in that letter? Read the story, ponder over the inci- dents narrated, and then, in your own words, write the letter for Susan. Send it to us. For the cleverest letter, which we will publish in a later edition of MIDNIGHT, we will pay $10 in cash. Address your letter to Editor, MIDNIGHT, 119 West 40th Street, New York City. ND now I must begin the letter to John. It is the most important turning point of my life. Upon the words I shall now pen hangs Destiny as by a thread. All I have written so far is: “Dear John Only I cannot seem to seal my fate just yet. Memory comes thronging at my heart, bits of con- versation—the giddy kaleidoscope of events that marked John’s five days’ stay in New York. Yellow globules of light, raucous wail of jazz orchestra, silk-swathed walls—a packed floor— and couples at tables either sipping black coffee or a mild amber fluid through straws. Such made up the regular night scene of one of New York’s most popular Midnight Clubs. John Morehouse, my out-of-town beau, pros- perous young farmer of Lehigh County, was getting hig first taste of New York night life. Suddenly the dense floor cleared, and the lights dimmed. Varicolored rays of lavender and deep rose played on a single representative of the Terpsi- chorean art, nude except for a fragile fringe around her waist. There was a hush. I saw John stiffen and I remember I smiled over at him wickedly. But young Rawlison looked at the scene with almost a bored glance, his fine profile quiet and as aristocratic as ever. Meanwhile the pink and white Hula Hula lady undulated sinuously are di1some stomach gyrations to the tabl2s around er. Slowly John’s face reddened. looked my way pleadingly. “What do you call this?’’ he asked thickly. “Just New York, little boy,’’ I returned. Now I had the chance I longed for—the chance to compare the two men at close range, John and young Rawlison. I had always intended to go home in the end and marry John. But in the last two months the coming of Rawlison into my life had turned everything topsyturvy. Prosperous young New York business man, he stood for the heart's desire of every sensible-minded flapper—a good old name, a good provider, and good-looking enough to cause envy in every other feminine breast. That was Rawlison. And John! Only yesterday, it seemed to me, had my small apartment been thrown into a furor over news of John’s coming. “What's the glad tidings, old dear?” had inquired ‘Smoke,’ my studio-apartment mate, at that mo- ment peeking her head out of our tiny marble- tiled bath. Smoke was getting ready to go out. “It’s John!’ I shrieked. ‘John will arrive in town 5.15 Standard Time tomorrow!” I had been looking for the telegram all that day, and at the news Smoke slammed the door. Next moment came sounds of the shower and Smoke's subdued gurgles as she talked out to me through the cold spray. “What d’yu—stippose—your small town hick— br-rr—will think Laer I didn’t answer. I just smoothed out that yellow slip of paper again, signed “As ever, John More- pouse,”” and kissed it for its dear, unstudied sim- He turned and Sweetheart in New Yor plicity. A thousand tender memories stormed for recognition in my heart. Also, a thousand little stab-wounds at the thought of the long trail I had trodden away from the old cherry-blossom lane, John’s and mine, and the gnarled tree where John had given me the first kiss ] had ever known from a man. I breathed a fervent wish that my lips were as unsullied now as then. Thoughts came thronging, thronging . . . . The time, Hal'owe’en it was, when John ducked my head all the way under as my mouth was searching for apples to bite in the big tin washtub. I came up dripping and chased John in and out among the boys and girls, and finally outdoors into the crisp October night. John had been so worried that my wet head would bring me down with a cold; he drew off his coat and threw it over me. Then kissed me under it. It all came back the Virginia reel that wound up the evening's festivities . . . . How John’s father whirled around little Rebecca Com- stock! Mr. Morehouse was a fine dancer, despite his seventy odd years, hale and hearty as a russet apple. He spun the plate better than anyone— but in the end he spun it so hard that it crashed into a thousand pieces. How he roared! FINALLY, my back-sliding of fancy was inter- rupted by Smoke bursting through the door in a whirlwind of wet towels. She snapped on the connection to the electric curling-iron, darted back to apply vanishing cream, then let forth a verbal volley. “Just let me bat my eye at your old John and Herb Rawlison with their sea-legs on down Broad- way! Say, Sue,” she called, ‘‘do we order gingerpop ot Harvest Hom2 Unsurpassed at our wild jamboree? She squinted one plucked eyebrow and blue-pencilled the other. My heart sank with a great lump when my brain tried to register Herbert Rawlison, poised man of the world, and—and my John, the other male of a foursome! I just couldn't seem to focus the picture on my mental vision. That evening, I remember, happened to be an empty one in a mad whirl that had been lasting almost a month—Mr. Herbert Rawlison, stock broker and young clubman, was giving me the rush of my young life. After I had packed Smoke into her plush velvet evening cloak, I had decided to spend the night mending my jazzed nerves by a little beauty sleep—but somehow this little program of beauty-culture didn't appeal. Instead, I flopped among the cushions of our convertible Davenport and thoughtfully lit a cigarette. John I could almost see his broad smiling face and strong chin. From childhood almost, John and I always intended to marry. But a little talent for drawing had sent me to New York and the Student’s Art League, where I had picked up several tricks beside putting saucy charcoal figuvcs on paper. There followed a good offer from a magazine as fashion artist. My course from then on was that of every pretty, unprotected girl in New York—dates, cabarets, midnight clubs, lovers— until I had become a sophisticated woman of the world with just the slightest cynical curl to her upper lip. : . F : HE sudden blare of the orchestra brought me with a jerk back to the Hula Hula lady who was now singing a weird monotonous melody. She was obviously trying to inspire in her listeners a com-, plex that was a cross between a gin rickey cocktail and a “moon-bathed tropic isle.’ Suddenly I despised the dancer's cheap way of arousing the senses. Was John being affected? I glared at him— let him dare fall victim to her gluttonous charms! With a sharp stab I realized that I loved John. I eyed him tenderly. Smoke, her chin cupped in one slim hand, her other hand toying with a long lemonade glass, was giving him long dangerous glances from under her eyelashes. It amused me— (Continued on Page 29)
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“Page Seven Did the Parson Love the Naughtiest Girl in 1A merica entered the box at the old Olympic. That ancient Temple of Burlesque, housed under the roof of Tammany Hall, has opened its doors to many a clergyman, bent on knowing the truth about the devil-inspired witchery of Burlesque, and here was another. Not a clergyman yet, but a clergyman-to-be. He was the typical theological student, clean-faced, immature, with wide-open, half-frightened eyes, wanting to find the truth, but almost afraid to look. He had fidgeted nervously in his chair during the overture; had peered furtively along the rows of waiting burlesque fans, in orchestra and balcony, who chewed gum, smoked cigarettes, read papers, waiting for the curtain to rise; had blushed furiously when the bare-legged girls came romping on the stage roaring the opening song. But he kept his nerve, and was feeling almost comfortable, by the time Margie Panneti came tripping out, stepping lightly, laughing yaily, swaying rythmically, laugh- ing her low, gay laugh, shaking her dainty, tremu- lous body, singing a tingling song, every nerve of her quivering with a surging joy, joy of youth, joy of dance, joy of song, joy of love, joy of-—— I looked at my theological student. trembling too, but not with joy. Margie spatted him almost at once and set herself to the delicious task of tormenting him. Behind her on the stage the laughing girls pranced and quiveréd, sang and cooed and whistled and held out their white arms, but he saw no one but Margie. Nor, incidentally, was he quite alone in that. I have noticed that Margie hardly needs the spot- light when she is on. Apparently it doesn’t make much difference what she does, she has her crowd. She may sing or not, as the fancy strikes her; she may dance, or stand still; she may be clothed from head to foot, or show every line and muscle of her lithe, little body. But the electric currents pulsing through her radiate throughout the house and fasten every thought and every nerve in the audience upon her. And this grip of hers upon my little theological student was quite terrible to behold. She had him hypnotized from the instant of her appearance. | KNEW exactly what he was the moment I He was The ‘‘naughtiest girl in America’’ reforms a parson. This is one of the most unusual stories ever printed —and don’t forget that MIDNIGHT specializes in unusual stories. And she played with him, as a wicked little kitten will play with a trembling mouse. She shook her brown curls at him; she threw him flashes from her big, brown, Italian eyes; she swayed near him, holding out her fingers; she tip-toed nearer; she flung mock, wanton kisses from her arched lips; she shook her little orm from neck to toes at him—as she sang: “Cutie, my cutie— Must I go away?” The boy sighed with relief at the end of the number. But before he could catch his breath she was at him agdin, responding to the encore. There had been an added thunder in the applause which always brings Margie back, for the crowd had seen her game and wanted more of it. And Margie would not disappoint them. Nor was she herself through with the boy. Her fun had just begun. Silent, she came toward him, leaning over the box rail, as the chorus kept up the tune and the step— “Cutie, my cutie— Must I go away?” Her white shoulders stooping toward him, her lips within easy kissing distance; her hands stroking his crimson face— “Cutie, my cutie— Must I go away?” De laughing Fourteenth-streeters wanted more of her, and encored her a dozen times. She gave them what they wanted. She shimmied—and along Fourteenth Street they think no one can shimmy quite like Margie. And I am inclined to think they are right. She stands, bright-eyed, laughing-lipped, at times every muscle of her body still but the swaying breasts. Then she is gone— and the trombone booming and the violin singing— and the next number is on. But my theological student. At last conscience had come to his rescue. He was angry. The crimson blushes had gone from his cheeks, teaving them dead white. He looked around at me with staring eyes. “What a wicked girl!’’ he hissed. “Margie wicked?”’ I countered. ‘These folks don’t think so.” “Bah! They are wicked, too. I'm going out.” I don’t know what sort of whim it was that seized me, but I wanted to see more of that young theo- logue’s mind. “Wouldn’t you like to meet Margie? . Perhaps if you saw her and shook hands with her you wouldn’t think she is so bad.” , He trembled again, and the red came surging back to his cheeks. “Why not?” I urged. “Margie, after all, is just human, and your business is with human beings. Let me introduce you.” That was the beginning of something whose end I cannot yet forsee. But the student said, ‘‘Yes,” and during the intermission I took him back stage,, and into Margie’s dressing room. She held out one soft white hand to him, the other to me. “Hello!”’ she said. I am sure that if it were to Cardinal Hayes, or to the Prince of Wales, or to President Millerand, or to Secretary of State Hughes her greeting would be the same—‘‘Hello.” Her face, even in its fierce covering of stage paint, was frank, innocent, pretty. Her low voice soothed, tormented, captured him. It’s all wicked.
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‘I hope you didn’, mind my horse-play,” she laughed, The young fellow was game. "Yes, Margie,’ he met her challenge. “I did anind it. I want to talk with you about it. May 1?” “Sure thing. But I haven’t time now.” “Can’t we have supper with you after the show?” I suggested. “Nope. Got a date. and I'm with you.” “Could I see you at your house, perhaps,” asked the theologue. “Sure. Why not?’’ Doc here will bring you over any time. Come next Sunday morning.” - And that is how it happened that the following Sunday morning we were sitting in a little parlor over in Brooklyn, where Margie lives with a friend and the friend’s daughter, waiting for her to join us. And that is how I came to get the whole of Margie’s story, for the young fellow meant business, and since he had set out to save her soul was going to learn all about her soul that she would tell him. I MYSELF was a bit taken aback when Margie at last radiated into the room. That’s a strange word, but you have to use strange words when you talk about Margie. Not a thing that she does is done as anyone else in the world would do it. I've tried to walk along Broadway with her, but dne can’t make very rapid progress. From every doorway comes the greeting— “Hello, Margie!’ And if it is her fancy she stops to talk—and one can wait till she gets through, or pass on, as one likes. Or she'll pop into a drug store to get a prescrip- tion filled; or into a cake shop to order a bag of cookies; or suddenly remember that she must go uickly to Coney Island, where she reigned when the was a slip of a girl fifteen poor old. And most of the time she'll be humming a bit of atune. It may be the Yiddish lullaby with which she sets her Houston Street audiences off into chuckles if she is playing at Minsky’s National Winter Garden, or go through her bit as the Italian peddler woman—or, teasingly— “A baby, a baby, A baby in love—” But here she was coming, fresh from a good night's sleep, rosy, bright, sparkling-eyed. Not a touch of paint, but a radiant glow of girlish health. Pure, white forehead; flashing, honest, friendly eyes; Make it some other time, rougish mouth, with uptilted corners; delicate skin; _ clustering brown hair; firm, soft hands, her whole body, under its rose-blush morning robe, radiating youth and mirth. “‘Hello!”’ she said. We had approached the inner shrine of the Temple of Burlesque, and its high priestess was giving us her benediction. For this I had tried to make clear to my young friend on our journey over to Brooklyn. That there is something almost religious about Burlesque. He had been horrified at that, and I had had some of Margie’s own fun in opening his eyes. “Have you, for instance,’ I asked him, “read Floyd Dell’s chapter about Burlesque in ‘The Briary Bush?’ ” No, he hadn’t. “So far as I know,” I told him. ‘Dell is the only serious author who has attempted to analyze Burlesque. It is only a touch he gives us, but it is masterful. It is a psychological study of Burlesque, and of a burlesque audience. And he thinks Bur- lesque has a deep and a quite likely legitimate place in the emotions of men and women.” “T don’t believe it,” said my young friend, stoutly. “No. I know you don’t, and that is why I am anxious for you to get acquainted with Margie. You'll know more about Burlesque when you know more about her, But Dell is not the only author who thinks Burlesque is significant and wholesome. I was talking only the other day to another promi- nent writer of fiction. I confessed to being a bur- lesque fan—and asked if he ever went. And he surptised me by saying he goes every week. He's seventy years old now, and he ought to know some- thing about whether it is harmful or not.” Still the young dominie shook his head. But I wanted him to understand more before he began his talk with Margie. I had continued: “Burlesque, I think, goes back to those ancient times when sex was frankly worshipped, not branded as a shameful thing. You are familiar, of course, from your studies, with those ancient religions?” He shuddered again, and blushed. “Yes, and I hate to read about them.” “Truc.” T agreed. “It is rather distressing reading. But after all it’s human history. And it’s What do you suppose hap- pened when the impression- able young minister was in- troduced to a burlesque act- ress in her dressing room? This story tells you. Any- way, parsons ought not to be in the dressing rooms of actresses. not strange when one comes to think of it that in groping after the true religion men should have worshipped what seemed to them the mightiest, most nearly miraculous force in nature.” “Yes,” he persisted. ‘‘But we have gotten away from that. Why go back to it” “Perhaps you are right,’’ I agreed. ‘But Bur- lesque is here, as a fact in American life. Ahd here is Margie, whom we are about to meet face to face. And let me tell you that what I like about Burlesque is this very frankness, this very absence of deceit and camouflage that disgusts me with so much else that I see on the stage. “Moralists have tried to frighten the human family,” I went on, ‘by warnings that the whole world of the stage and the drama was too closely associated with ‘sex impulses. Under the strain of that warning, playwrights and producers, have tried to dodge that implication, and have covered up the element of the sex appeal. “In the most flagrant sex farces and the most suggestive dances there is always the hypocritical denial to the audience that these performances have any direct sex appeal. Even during these last seasons, when the dancers have been wearing fewer and fewer clothes, and the actors and actresses have introduced plainer and plainer speech, there has always been the pretense ‘Now you are not supposed to notice the sex element here. This is art. This is drama.’ “But Burlesque,” I told him. ‘Burlesque, roisterous, riotous, often clumsy, often coarse, I grant you, at least sweeps aside all this hypocrisy and camouflage. Burlesque says ‘We are going to be frank and direct about this whole matter. This is what these dances, these costumes, these songs, these crude farces mean. We are honest, and frank, and clean and gay about it. And if you like it, pay your money, and come in, and laugh, and worship with us.’ “Burlesque,” I ended, for we were near Margie’s door, “‘is the last remaining Temple for those ancient rites. Perhaps you reformers will tear it down. Perhaps you should, I don’t know. I am only telling you what I think Burlesque signifies. Here it stands, the one public institution where these facts of life are frankly faced, and frankly dealt with, And at the heart of it all stands Margie—” And heré she stood, saying ‘‘Hello!” Bu Marjorie had not had her breakfast. We sat watching the little household—Edna, a former burlesque beauty, Estelle, her fourteen-year-old daughter. And, just as admiration and affection for Margie leaps out from Fourteenth Street and Forty-fifth Street, and Houston Street doorways to greet her as she passes, so affection for her shines out in every word and movement of that diminuitive Brooklyn home where she abides. Love for Margie is the basis and the atmosphere of the household. Estelle to run and fetch for her, to save her steps, to see that she gets her rest: Edna, to get her breakfast and fix her bath, and make sure that she is feeling well. Not because they must, but because they love her. And Margie, I chuckled inwardly as I saw on the young parson’s face the dawning of something that was almost like worship—-Margie, not presuming on their devotion, not accepting their service as a matter of course, but with sweet signs of apprecia- tion and of love returned—flashing back her smiles there just as from the sidewalks of Broadway, and as happy over their devotion as over the boisterous admiration that has come to her across the foot- lights in a hundred cities. — ea And this is Margie's story, its beginning told there at the breakfast table of the little Brooklyn flat, where the parson and I sat sharing her tiacon and eggs, for she and Edna insisted on that -and drinking her morning coffee with her. I watched the parson’s face as she talked, the signs of indigna- tion and reproach giving way steadily before the growing sense of understanding, approbation, ad- miration—and what else I feared to reckon. The story was continued a few nights later in Freeman’s eating and chatting rendezvous for foot-light folk, and some of it still later in a swaying taxicab, en route to Coney Island, where the little songster had to meet her accompanist to get a song transposed, the last chapter in a little Italian res- taurant on Houston Street near the National Winter Garden, where she often appears. ARGIE, we found—I had not known these de- tail facts before—is just twenty-six—thirteen years off the stage, from cradle to adolescence, thir- teen years upon it. She had been married three times, two husbands dead, one dismissed. At some points in the narrative I felt the young parson’s muscles twitch, as though his fears and indignation might return—as when she told of a fight in an East Side restaurant between gangsters hired by an ad- mirers of hers with an innocent young electrician she happened to be having tea with—and of the suicide of another admirer, a prosperous New York lawyer whose suit she could not encourage. These points came out from close questioning. We were trying to get at the soul of Margie. Perhaps we succeeded too well, for that young parson—but I am getting ahead of my story. “My father,” Margie told us, “was an Italian barber on Prince Street, over on the East Side. They thought I was in school, but I had run away from school and was working in a cracker factory. I didn’t like school, and I was bound and determined to gét on the stage. I thought I could do it quicker if I was at work than if I was in school. “When I was only a tiny girl I used to practice ny dances in front of the big mirror in my father’s shop. “One day I peeked inside the door of Austin Davis’s office on Forty-fifth Street, near Broadway. He and his wife, Lottie Davis, ran an agency there, and his wife was drilling some girls for a show in another room. “T tiptoed in, and looked up at him.” Just then I happened to look over at my parson. We weren't getting very far with spiritual problems. But we had asked Margie to tell us her life story, and she was telling it. leaned the young student to know and understand the girl as a human being before he began to deal with her soul. ““Do you need any girls?’ I asked him,” Margie went on. “And he growled at me—‘Get out of here and go back to school. Do you think I want the Children’s Aid Society after me?’ “T would go home every night. The folks thought I was in school all the time. Then at last they found out I had left school and was.in the factory, and didn’t kick about that. They didn’t know I was playing hooky from the factory just as I did from school. I stole a long skirt of my mother’s, and went up to Davis's office nearly every day. And he kept getting sorer and sorer. “There’s that damned kid again!’’ he said to his wife when I came in the last time. ““*T can dance,’ I told him. : “Lottie, try her out,’ he snapped out—and I got my chance. “Mrs. Davis took me into the room where the girls were rehearsing—and,”’ Margie lapsed into the lingo of burlesque—‘‘I beat the bunch of them. “So they took me on. I was afraid to go home, so I stayed with the Davises for three days. Then I went home and my mother was so tickled to see me that she didin’t scold much. But they were afraid something must have happened to me, and took good pains to find out. When they made sure I was alright, they figured that if I could take care of myself for three days I could for a long trip, so they let me go with the show. “My father got me a funny little camel-top trunk, which made me lots of trouble later—for a round top trunk is bad luck to a burlesque show. “Anyhow, off I went with the show. 1 was John Cort’s California Girlsk—and I was end pony. I put on long dresses. I had a little Norfolk suit, with a belt. After a week in Hurtig and Seaman’s Harlem Opera House, we took the road, and finally landed in Canada. Here they put me off the stage hecause [ was too young. At Montreal the boys busied my trunk. They couldn’t risk the hard luck anv longer ** (Continued on Page 20)
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Page Vine Sold to the Devil “T will sell my Soul to the Devil for Fifty Dollars” That was the note that inspired this unusually gripping serial story by John R. Coryell, master of mysterious plots. Read this most astounding narrative of a man’s redemption. OSEPHUS MARBLE was always an early riser, but one July morning he had risen rather earlier than usual, and having donned his vest, was standing at his window as he buttoned it. Suddenly he suspended operations and stared fixedly. He was watching a young man who was doing what seemed to him a very peculiar thing—a thing that was commonplace enough in itself, but became peculiar by reason of the circumstances attending it. Josephus Marble lived in an upper apartment facing Riverside Drive not far from Grant’s Tomb, so that a part of his view took in a considerable stretch of grassy lawn. The young man he was watching had approached a slope of grass in a manner to indicate a desire not to be seen; and as at that early hour the place was deserted, he seemed satisfied for he suddenly stooped, cut into the grass swiftly, lifted a slab of the turf, placed something under it, pressed it back into its original position, stood up, glanced quickly about and walked away. Among his other attributes Josephus Marble was a man a lively imagination; consequently the con- duct of the young man intrigued him. He con- tinued to watch him, studying him meanwhile. He saw that he was a powerfully built young man, but bore himself with an air of profound dejection; that he was wearing unseasonably heavy clothes and a soft, felt hat; and that he seated himself on a bench overlooking the river in a way to suggest de- spondency. “Now, what the dickens does it mean?" Josephus Marble asked himself. ‘Perhaps he is hiding some- thing he has stolen, but it doesn’t look like that. I’m curious. I’m going to find out.’’ He carefully brushed his coat and put it on, always with his eyes on the spot where the something had been buried. Then he snatched up his hat and hurried out of his apartment and down the stairs, not waiting to signal for the elevator because he knew it would be slow in coming up. He had fixed the hiding place so accurately that he had no difficulty in finding it. Like the young man, he glanced swiftly around first. But unlike the young man, he also looked up and swept the windows of the apartment house. He saw no one either there or on the street, so he quickly lifted the turf, discovered a bit of white paper and appro- priated it, replacing the turf. He quickly regained the vestibule of the apart- ment house and unfolded the paper and read a line that was written on it—just one line, but a very singular one. Josephus Marble read it over again as if to assure himself that he had not been mistaken. Then he ejaculated under his breath, ‘‘Great Scott!’’ The line read, “I'll sell my soul to the Devil for fifty dollars. Everett Lane.” Josephus Marble was a man of affairs who had prospered because he came to his decisions quickly and as quickly acted on them. He thrust the bit of paper into his pocket and set out in the direction of where he had last seen the young man. As he came to the top of the rise he saw the young man still sitting on the bench. He approached him slowly, studying him the while. He decided, from the unshaven face and general unkemptness of appearance that the young man was down and out. He went over and seated himself on the bench. The young man gave him one glance and then resumed his moody study of the river. “Good morning, Mr. Lane!’’ Marble said quietly. Lane turned swiftly and studied him carefully, surprise in his blue eyes. ‘‘] don’t remember you,’ he said. “Of course not,”’ agreed Marble; ‘‘but I know you. You are Everett Lane.” “Yes,’’ admitted the other Everett Lane.” “And you want fifty dollars,’’ went on Marble, taking out his pocketbook. “How in Hell did you know that?’’ demanded Lane with every evidence of extreme surprise, and with more than a suspicion of uneasiness. “Exactly!” responded Marble, fully conscious of the humorous suggestion in the question, and fitting his answer to it with a faint smile that seemed to the young man a bit sinister. He eyed Marble in silence as the latter carefully counted out five ten dollar bills and offered them to him. He made no move to take the money. “What am I to do for it?’’ he asked huskily. “Oh!” responded Marble, “are you so particular? I thought this was your price.” Lane moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘How did you know?” he asked with some difficulty. Marble shrugged his shoulders. ‘What does that matter? You offered your soul for fifty dollars, didn’t you?” “yes.” “And now you change your mind.” “No—o. Mayn’t I know what I am to do for the money ?”’ “There is no question yet of what you are to do. This is only purchase money. Why did you make the offer if you didn’t mean it?’’ “T meant it when I made it, or thought I did. Perhaps it was only,an expression of despair. I’m cautiously, ‘I’m Suddenly he suspended operations and stared fixedly, up against it, you see. how did you know?” “You don’t believe I’m the Devil, then?’ “You may be a devil for all I know, but you are not the Devil.” “Do you mean you decline the bargain?” asked Marble. ; A grim smile parted the lips of the young man. “T don’t care to deal with agents,” he said. ‘What I might do if his Satanic Majesty came in person I don’t know. I’m sorry, for I need the money. You see you don’t qualify. Your feet are normal, your eyebrows don’t slope upward, and I don’t believe I never expected to—Say! there is room under your hat for horns. No, put your money away again. But how did you know? No one saw me.” Josephus Marble laughed outright. “But I did see you,” he assured him. ‘I was looking out’ of the window of my apartment. I was curious, I hurried down and here I am. I like your looks, I like you. Here are the fifty dollars. Take them! The money isn’t tainted, and there are no strings tied to it. My name is Josephus Marble.”’ “The financier?” “The same. Funny for a financier to be giving away money, I know; but I’m a bit romantic when I’m not working. Strange, isn’t it?’ “Not a bit,” said Lane emphatically. ‘‘My father always said that no man could make a big success in finance unless he was romantic. I'll take the money, thank you! I may never be able to pay it back, but I hope to,” “T don’t want you to pay it back. When you are successful—I know you will be—pass it on to some- body who needs it, telling him to do the sgme
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“Page Fen ; Now come have breakfast with me! shungry.’”’ I'll say I am; but I’m not presentable, so if you’ll excuse me——” “T’ll not. I’ma bachelor. Come have a bath and a breakfast. Then go your way as soon as you like.” “T don’t believe you're even a devil,” laughed Everett Lane, rising to his feet. “You've never met me on the street,’’ returned Marble, also laughing. He was in a fine humor over his morning’s experience. When they reached the apartment, Marble took his guest into his bedroom. ‘Make yourself at home,” he said. ‘There is the bathroom. What size collar do you wear?” “Seventeen. But ie “Pshaw! a shirt! Get your bath! You'll find a razor in there.”’ I'll bet you're ARBLE was a rather small, slender man. He wore a fifteen collar himself, so he sent out for a suitable shirt, collar and underclothes for Lane; and when he heard the latter moving in the bedroom, called out to him, “Breakfast is ready. Eat in your underclothes. There.are no females here.’’ It was a different young man that came out of the bedroom, and one very good to look at. And the very scantiness of his attire made him the more attractive, betraying, as it did, his splendid muscular development. Moreover his clean-shaven face confirmed Marble in the opinion that he was hand- some in a strong, virile way. Lane ate with the relish of a famishing man, but with the moderation of a well-bred one. ‘My first in three days,” he explained to his host. “T don’t wonder you wanted to sell out,’’ com- mented Marble. “Oh, it wasn’t that,” was the hasty response. ‘T could have stood the lack of food, but I'd failed in everything; I saw no way out. I came to New York with a definite purpose, and I’ve lost out—for the time being,” he added. - “You mean you haven’t given up yet?” “That's what I mean; and I guess that’s why I made that fool play about selling my soul.” “Mind telling me? Or is it a dead secret?” inquired Marble with a smile. He found his young companion more and more enqneing: “Sure, I'll tell you. Maybe it’ll give you a chance to laugh. I come from Chicago. uty father was a fairly rich man; practically owned the J. L. & C. Railroad.” “Oh! Jared Lane. He was your father, eh?” “Yes. Did you know him?” “Knew of him; that’s all. The Walter’s syndicate ate him up.” “Ruined him.- Killed: him I think. He and Walters had a written agreement that safeguarded father. The original agreement was in Dad’s safe at home. One night burglars came and took that and some other unimportant papers. Dad always believed Walters was at the bottom of that burglary; and I believe it. I had an idea I could get square with Walters if I came on here.” Josephus Marble was greatly interested. ‘‘You mean that as long as that agreement was in exist- ence Walters could do nothing, but with it out of the way he could wreck the road?’’ “That's it. And I came on here to wreck him. Good joke, isn’t it? I had a thousand dollars when I came here. All I have now is some knowledge of the stock market. But I’m not done with him yet. If it’s humanly possible he'll pay for what he did to my father.” : “Hm!” grunted Marble abstractedly. be done.” +) “You mean make Walters pay? I wish you’d show me the way.” i hel “How far would you go? Would you fight fire with fire? Would you play his own game in his own way?’ “Wouldn’t 1? Try me.” : “Well,” said Marble, ‘I owe Walters something for a few mean tricks he’s played me. We might go in together. What do you say?” “T say yes.” “Good. You'll have to let me advance some more money. Spend the day in fitting yourself out in proper clothes, and come here to dine tonight at seven. I'll have a plan worked out by that time.” | fis ri private secretary to Jim Walters was laid up with tonsilitis, and Bob Street, his new assistant, had received orders to be ready that Saturday afternoon to go with Walters to his sum- mer home on the north shore of Long Island. Walters had sworn freely at the news.that Hark- ness was ill, and was very gruff with Street when he ordered him to be in readiness. Street’s handsome “It might face had flushed, but had shown no other sign of dis- pleasure at his employer’s tone. He had been with Walters for two weeks, and had made a good impression by his quick intelligence and by his ready grasp of his duties. That is, he had made a good impression on Harkness. He had had very little to do with the great financier, and besides no one ever made a good impression on him. “Tt’s a damned nuisance, Harkness being sick,’’ he had said to the new assistant secretary. ‘I need him. You come well recommended, but I don’t know you yet. I’ve got to trust you a little, but what I want to tell you is that I expect you to keep your mouth shut about anything you learn while you're with me. If you don’t, Til know it; and by God! you'll be sorry for it.” He believed in ruling by fear; and indeed there were many substantial men on Wall Street who were mortally afraid of him. If the stalwart young secretary was afraid, he did not betray it on his impassive face. And, ‘‘yes sir,” was all he said in response. _ It was about three o'clock in the afternoon that, in obedience to a gruff word of command from Walters, the young secretary gathered together his bundles of papers and followed the imperious financier out of the offices and into the street. A handsome limousine stood by the curb; and at their appearance a footman sprang from his seat and hastened to open the door of the car. Walters, withou~ a word to his secretary, entered the car. Street followed him. Then, for the first time, he saw there was another occupant of the car, a very beautiful young woman of about thirty. “Sit there!’’ ordered the financier, indicating one of the hinged, front seats. . Suppose a sinister form appeared to you in the blackness of night, when you were all alone? “] AM THE DEVIL” he said. This hair-raising thriller is guaranteed to take the kinks out of your hair TREET flushed, but sat down without a word, though he flashed a swift glance at the lady, who sat quite still and silent, a cold, disdainful expression on her lovely face. “My secretary,” said Walters curtly, addressing the lady. She looked at him and then at Street. Then quietly and without any show of emotion spoke. “T don’t know,” she said, looking straight at Walters, “which of us you meant to insult—both probably.” She turned to the startled secretary. ‘“‘I am Mrs. Walters, his wife. I should like to know your name.” “Street,” he contrived to say with some difficulty. “Now we know each other even if we haven't been properly introduced,” she said with a smile. Walters, who had listened like a man choked with anger, now snatched the speaking tube from its hook and roared into the mouthpiece, ‘‘Go on!” The ride must have been of nearly two hours duration, but not a word was spoken by the occu- pants of the car in all that while. Mrs. Walters studied the secretary with perfect frankness as if making a mental estimate of him. Street, on his part, studied her furtively. He decided that she was very beautiful and very strong-willed; and he had no doubt that she thoroughly disliked her husband. The way in which she ignored him would have been evidence enough of that; and moreover to dislike Jim Walters seemed to the secretary the most natural thing in the world. The union between the hard man of fifty and the beautiful creature by his side seemed a hideous thing to the young man, who was at his most romantic age, but it was easy for him to understand that Walters had married her for her beauty, and that she had taken him for his wealth. The Walters home was little less than:a_ palace. When the car stopped under the porte cochere the door was opened by the alert footman, and they all alighted. Walters, without a word to or glance at his wife, went into the house. Street stood still “ embarrassment, looking at her. She smiled at im. “You’d better follow him,’’ she said. ‘The butler will see that your suit case goes to your room. Dinner at seven. Any of the footmen will show you to your room when you are ready to dress.’’ Sees was glad then that he had the wit to have his dinner clothes packed when he had telephoned to his rooms to have his suit case sent down to him. ‘Thank you!” he stammered, and set off in pursuit of the financier. He overtook Walters as the latter was entering the library. A much smaller room, opening out of the great library, was fitted up with desk and safe and all the other.accessories of an office. They sat down in there and worked steadily for an hour. Occasionally the financier asked a question doubt- fully and seemed surprised to have a prompt answer given him. : “You follow the market ?’’ he said once. “T study it carefully,” was the response. “Hm!” grunted the financier. It was his nearest approach to approval, though he knew his work had never been done more swiftly or accurately. Occasionally, when there was a lull in the work, the secretary looked about the room with an air of indifference, though, in fact, he was taking careful note of everything, especially of the safe. At about ‘six o’clock there came a knock at the door. A look of annoyance clouded Walters’ face and he roared out, “Who is it?” The door was opened a little way and a voice answered, ‘It is I, Daddy. May I come in?” “Beryl!” he shouted joyously, a smile lighting up his’ face; the first Street had ever seen there. “Come in! Come in!” The door was flung open and a girl of about eigh- teen years darted in and ran to the grim financier and was folded in his arms. In the brief glimpse of her the young secretary had had, it seemed to him that he had never seen so charming a creature. She was a little under middle height, round and plump without being in the least fat and was the very personification of grace as she moved across the room. It was instantly manifest that here was one person the financier loved with all his heart; and Bob Street inwardly decided that that would be an exceedingly easy thing to do. He was still studying her and thinking how delight- ful it would be to be in Walters’s place just then, when the financier seemed suddenly to recall his presence, for he snapped out, ‘I shan’t want you any more, Street. You may go.”” Beryl started back from her father and turned toward Street as he rose to his feet. ‘‘Oh!’’ she ejaculated, “I thought it was Mr. Harkness.” And then as Street bowed and started toward the door, she added, ‘‘Why don’t you introduce us, Daddy?” Walters grunted as if to show his sense of the needlessness of any such ceremony and said, ‘‘Street, ee - my daughter. Street is a new secretary, eryl.”’ With that he would have drawn the girl toward him again, but she went around the desk, and advancing toward Street, held out her hand; a hand that Street was sure was the prettiest he had ever seen. And when he took it in his, he was equally sure that it was the firmest, softest and sweetest bit of flesh he had ever touched. “I'm happy to meet you, Mr. Street,”’ Beryl said. “Thank you!’ he contrived to murmur. In another minute he was out of the room, inwardly abusing himself for having been so inarticulate. III HE had no difficulty in finding someone to show him his room, for the house seemed to swarm with servants. When he was alone he studied his quarters with interest. He had half expected to be put in a sparsely furnished room, but instead he found himself in the most luxurious chamber he had ever seen, with an adjoining bathroom fitted up with more appliances than he had dreamed existed. “Well,” he muttered as he looked about, ‘‘you’re a pig, Jim Walters, but I can’t find any fault with your sty. I'll bet, though, that I owe this to that beautiful iceberg of a wife of yours. She is beauti- ful, but oh boy! Beryl! I wish she wasn’t that old pirate’s daughter.” He made his toilet with unusual care, and with the hope in his breast that he might encounter Beryl (Continued on Page 30)
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= $$$ $j ID you ever notice that weirdly sad little note in Fanny Brice’s voice? Of course you have. You couldn’t miss it because it reaches down into your heart and grips it with what would be a poignant pain, only before it has time to register you are convulsed with laughter over her inimitable witti- cisms. Well, that voice introduces you to the real Fann Brice. The “highest salaried woman in vaudeville,” far-famed as one of the most irresistible com- ediennes ever seen on Broadway has all the essential qualities of a master of tragedy. It is hard to believe even after you have heard her sing ‘My Man’ with its ludicrously pathetic words, and you have felt a tightening sensation in your throat and your eyes have refused to function with their usual vision. You still think it must be some trick of the imagination. Fanny Brice tragic? That's a joke, surely! Nevertheless it is true. Tears seem to be ever lurking in the background of Fanny Brice’s comedy. To understand, you have to see and talk to Fanny in the intimacy oka regular ‘‘heart to heart’’ con- fidence. Then she pours it all out to you; her hopes, her ambitions, her beliefs, her deepest thoughts, her saddest experiences, her as yet unfulfilled desires. Some of it she knows you intend to “‘tell the world,” but some of it she knows you won't. She has the keenest intuition imaginable. She doesn’t say: “Now, don’t tell this. This is not for publication.” She looks into your eyes searchingly, compre- hendingly and she suys what is in her heart and she has the intelligence and the trust to know that those confidences that do not concern the world will not be violated. “For every day of success you must pay in two days of disappointment,” she said in that peculiarly appealing voice of hers, as I talked to her one night in her dressing room. She spoke between dabs of make-up, gazing abstractedly into the mirror, or glancing quickly at you with a sudden transition to comeey that chased the gloom from your thoughts before it sunk too deep. That is characteristic of Miss Brice’s genius—for she is unquestionably a genius—she never gives the pathos time to get planted. She uproots it from your mind before it takes soil. “Sure! Take it from me,” she said, with an expres- sive wave of her hands. ‘‘Nobody gets anything worth while without paying for it. Look at me! I’ve worked and waited and planned and stuck to my guns through thick and thin. I let nothing dis- courage ine. Believe me or not, I've had my share! Maybe you think I was born on the stage and couidn’t be pushed off, huh? I wasn’t born there— and I was pushed off many a time—only I wouldn’t ‘o! “I was pushed on to begin with and I said to myself, ‘there must have been some reason for that. That couldn’t be for nothing.’ So I stuck! . This is how it happened! George M. Cohan is a perfect gentleman, but unless you read what Fanny told Regina Cannon, who secured this unusualinterview, you might This, by the way, is one of the few times Miss Brice has talked about herself. not think so. “] was thirteen at the time and crazy to go on the stage.” Fanny's expressive eyes widened with excitement at the memory. “One evening they were having an ‘‘Amateur’s Night”’ in Keeney’s Theatre over in Brooklyn. Some little boys in our Deano hon were going over to enter the contest. vveryone in our street was excited over it and wént over to see the boys rform. My chum and I were just crazy to go. ut the tickets were twenty-five cents and we had never had that much in our lives. “ “How can we get it?’ said Hannah, “Barn it, of course!’ said I. There was no other way. So Hannah did some ironing and I made a baby dress for a friend and when six o’clock came we started out. It was some walk to Brooklyn, but we tramped it. We had no .carfare. We had only enough money to buy the tickets. It took’us nearly two hours to get to the theatre, and what do you think happened? Talk about disappointments in life.’ Fanny’s hands talked again. “Tired and worn out as we were, we were told that all the twenty-five-cent seats had been sold. Can you imagine that? “We were too tired to go home, so we sat down to talk it over. Some of the boys who were entering the contest came along. We told them our troubles. One boy had a brilliant idea. ‘You two give your names in at the stage-door just as if you were going to enter the contest,’ he (Continued on Page 24)
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“Page Jwelve OMEN and wine. The association of these two is almost as old as the world itself. And associated they will continue to be until the final curtain is rung down upon the human race. : Women, instinctively, are honest and law abiding, but when they elect to stoop to crime, sometimes driven by necessity, but more frequently to obtain money for luxuries or to follow husbands or sweet- hearts into crooked paths, they bring with them a cleverness, a skill and a reckless daring which usually make them the superior of the male outlaws. History ranks women as the master pdisoners, killers and intriguers of the distant past, and modern criminal lore stamps them as remarkably clever shoplifters, blackmailers and smugglers. But today my lady of the underworld has turned to the newest and most profitable line of criminal endeavor—bootlegging—and her successes have been such that they have made the operations of her rivals of the sterner sex look amateurish by com- parison. Indeed, Mlle. French Heels is leading the field in the bootlegging handicap, and is making so much money that she has to buy sectional bookcases in which to file it away. But, what is more to the point, the beskirted bootleggers have shown a superior skill in keeping beyond the clutches of the law. Occasionally, when a few of them are apprehended, their sex stands them in good stead, and only in isolated cases has punishment been meted out. Those who were adjudged guilty probably lacked the good looks which sent their more fortunate sisters from the court rooms, smiling. The woman criminal who took to shoplifting made a most natural step because her clothing— wraps, skirts, muff and handbag—afforded ready places for the concealment of pilfered articles. But the game was dahgerous and the courts were stern with those of her calling. Smuggling, when successfully carried out, was profitable, but the government’s customs agents were perniciously active, seizures of goods paid for with real money were costly, and fines or imprison- ment were practically certain in the event of detec- -uon. Blackmail was the most dangerous of all the criminal pursuits. Any man can be “framed’’ so casily in a blackmail scheme that every male, ea CH HEELS Lothario and good-family man alike, fears this line of underworld enterprise, and it is the one crime for which a male jury will punish a woman, no matter how good looking she may be. Therefore, when bootlegging came to the fore, not only surpassing all of the other lines of crooked endeavor for sure, quick and enormous profits, but carrying with it an element of almost certain safety, it was small wonder that women embraced it ss a and in ever increasing numbers. oday bootlegging is the most popular get-rich- quick scheme in the history of crime, and loyely women are its chief promoters. However, there is one astounding fact in this connection, and it is that innumerable women are engaged in bootlegging in the most brazen manner and taking delight in their efforts. Previous tothe enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, these same women would have turned pale at the mere suggestion of committing a crime. But bootlegging is too fascinating and profitable to give up. They are in the new game to stick. A CHECKING up of the situation has shown that in practically every instance where a woman is engaged in bootlegging, either as a so-called “‘queen,”’ with hundreds of thousands of dollars at her disposal and operating on a large scale, or as a modest per- former, whose enterprises are limited to a very circumscribed area, there is a man behind the scenes: It is almost impossible for a woman to work alone in this enterprise, for most of those identified with actually procuring the contraband are of desperate character, and in negotiating with these there is an element of personal danger the wealthier class of fair bootleggers will not face. Some women are urged on by husbands or sweet- hearts, being content to carry out the wishes of those they love, plus luxuries and expensive living. Sometimes they need no urging to become the partners of men in this new line of crookedness, crime being an old story with them; and sometimes they employ men and boys as their agents. But the male always is present somewhere in the trans- actions, and reaps some of the profits. The feminine bootleggers can be divided into many classes, running all the way from the modishly gowned, daintily perfumed and carefully mani- cured women, with apartmentson Riverside Drive, Do You Prefer fl FATA When lavely woman stoops to crime, she does things up right. There are no half-way measures about her. Read this article about the: so-called weaker sex and shudder at woman’s inigq- uities—but it won’t do you any good to ask us for the addresses of any of the ladies mentioned herein. We know you uijll be interested in this unique feature. Park Avenue, or in some quiet but luxurious hotel, whose savoir faire serves as her passport anywhere; on through those who deal with men in business offices, the proprietors of beauty parlors, tea rooms and millinery shops, the hangers on in some of the white light district cabarets and Greenwich Village dungeons, down to the frowsy and weasel-eyed women of the lower east and far west sides, who dispense the poison distilled in cellars or tenement » rooms. But remember, that while the dainty and stylish women of the Eighties and Nineties are reaping harvests which, at times, run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the women “hootch hustlers” are getting theirs in far smaller amounts, every grade of feminine bootlegger is pocketing more money than she ever did in the past in any criminal pursuit, and one and all of them, if they are thrifty, can cravenette themselves against many rainy days in the future when the going may be- come muddy. HE high-class women bootleggers, the real “queens” of the enterprise, conduct their business in a manner which makes them practically immune from punishment, even though some of their hire- lings are tripped and caught. Though, perhaps, lacking somewhat in. refinement, experience has given them a front which enables them to come and go at will among the classes of persons who at all times are above suspicion. Most of them maintain lavishly furnished homes, and usually they live with husbands or protectors, thus being furnished with the necessary credentials to prefix their names with ‘“Mrs.’" Few of these keep liquor in quantities in their places of residence, though a sprinkling of the bolder ones have at- tempted to dispose of contraband in their homes, but exposure and seizure almost always followed such endeavors. No. Most of the ‘queens’ are the pink of propriety around the fami y fireside, are on good terms with their unsuspicious neighbors, and any business dealings conducted at: home are confined tothetelephone. Outside they meet their customers in many places, but their favorite stamping grounds are some of the larger hotels, the theatres and the more exclusive cabarets. ’Twould take voluines to detail all of their schemes, but here are some of them which work out smoothly.
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Page Thirteen. on American Bootlegs Blond or Brunette Bootleggers? MACAO Dressed in the height of fashion the feminine Lootlegget drives up to a hotel in a taxicab in the afternoon or early evening. Perhaps she is met by her husband or some other satellite, who intro- duces her to ‘Mr. Brown, a particular friend.” Mr. Brown, the “queen” and the third party chat for a few minutes, and then the latter flits away. He may be suspected and watched by inquisitive investigators or hotel detectives, and he is seen publically with ‘“‘his woman’’ as little as possible in business hours. Mr. Brown and Mrs. Bootlegger make their way to one of the dining rooms for a bite of lunch, in the course of which arrangements are made for the purchase of an expensive consignment of expensive liquors, all guaranteed to be the real thing, to be delivered at a certain address at a fixed time. The woman, if she is clever, memorizes the address, etc., for taking notes may excite suspicion. The “queen” fixes the price and the time for de- livery, but receives neither money nor check. She is perfectly certain that her partner has assured him- self that the customer was ‘‘good’’ before she was introduced, and that a check will follow the receipt of the goods. Men who purchase the better grades of liquor, and in quantities, never renege in their payments, for their consignment won't last forever and mutual good faith insures them a certain source of supply. ersons not familiar with the tricks of the trade might ask, “Why didn’t the man who made the introduction do all of the business?’’ The reasons are many. In the first place the women in the game can get the better prices, and purchasers have found them the more trustworthy, for they do not substi- tute or peddle inferior stuff as first-class brands. Then the partners figure that it is the better policy not to keep all of their eggs in a single basket. The man attends to the business of procuring the liquor and secreting it. The woman makes the sales and sees that the deliveries are properly made. This division of labor makes it possible for both of them to be busy at the same time on different angles of the scheme and, in the event of one being caught, the other is practically certain to escape. GAIN, Mrs. Bootlegger strolls into a hotel. Her male partner is not present, so she walks leisurely through the lobby and anterooms, looking about as though in search of someone. To the casual observer she appears to be only a fashionably gowned woman parading about in a desire to exhibit herself and her clothing. Nothing like it, however. Completing her stroll, she takes her place in a chair in an incon- spicuous corner of one of the rooms in which women usually linger, and waits. Perhaps it is a maid, but more Ekely a bell boy who finally approaches her and says, ‘‘Mrs. , the telephone call for you has come,” 6r something like that, which causes her to hasten to the telephone exchange. There, or nearby, she is greeted cordially by some man, though he is a total stranger to her, and the little luncheon episode and the placing of the order for contraband are carried through in the customary manner. The man who brought the customer fades from the picture after he slips the wise bell boy a liberal tip and tells him to go to the “‘lady wearing the mink coat and the purple hat sitting down toward the end of the corridor” in a few minutes, give her a certain message, and direct her to a point where a man, whom he indicates, will be waiting. A clever scheme, and with so many participants that few investigators would suspect it, and if they did, would not take the time to follow it through. Deliveries are made in many ways. The “phoney” milk and express wagons have not outlived their usefulness, and neither has the covered automobile with a butcher's or grocer’s sign lettered on the side. In front of the house where delivery is to be made, the vehicle stops, a boy takes out a basket apparently filled with paper bags or packages, bears it inside the house and then returns with an empty receptacle. Three stops in the course of a day are sufficient to deliver a lot of liquor. Contraband also has been delivered in talking machine packing cases, in pieces of furniture, in bundles of wall paper and in hundreds of other innocent appearing containers. Few are the police- men who would be suspicious in the circumstances, and the enforcement investigators are more inter- ested in suspected saloons and warehouses, in liquor being transported in large quantities in trucks, and in hunting for concealed stills and rum runners along the river fronts. There is another and less conspicuous class of women bootleggers who work the financial district and the larger business houses. These usually carry letters of introduction from one man to another. They can go anywhere without exciting suspicion and they appear to be what they represent themselves to be, clients, customers, out-of-town buyers or women in search of positions. Their male partners attend to the deliveries. Is your neighbor a boot- legger? How do you know she isn’t? This article tells you a few things about women you may never have known. Other bootleggers of the fair sex, who are content with lesser profits, find willing customers among the women’s card clubs and the clients of certain quiet tea rooms, beauty parlors and the establishments of some milliners and modistes. The sales through these agencies usually are for limited quantities of liquor, easily delivered. One woman bootlegger of this class, recently exposed, drove from the garage attached to her suburban home almost daily, with bottles of liquor hidden in the legs of ample canvas bloomers, over which a skirt was draped. Any person looking into her car would note nothing suspicious, not even a small package. The boot- legger, arriving at some out-of-the-way point in a suburban road, would meet her customer, also in an automobile, exchange the contraband for cash, and then return home. It was none of her worry how the other woman concealed the liquor until she reached her residence. A road accident, in which one of these bootleggers was injured, exposed the scheme. 1 that portion of New York City bordering upon Greenwich Village, the so-called heart of America’s Bohemia, there are innumerable stills at work, morning, noon and night, turning out liquor, most of which is of very inferior quality. ‘o be sure, heroic means have been utilized’to aT the trade ih contraband in the cabarets and restaurants of the Village but anyone who goes there thirsty and comes away in.the same condition, is either deaf and dumb or wears policemen’s shoes. Properly introduced, in some places the hooch is forthcoming promptly, but at outrageous prices, quantity and quality considered. owever, there are other means of ob- taining liquor in the Village, arid in quantities almost equal to the pre-Volstead days. Throughout ‘‘The Quarter,” in most places where the lights aré dim and the furnishings tawdry, you will find the female bootleggers of the district, sometimes clothed like the conventional flapper, and sometimes affecting the dress of those ‘‘natives”’ who have the art complex. These dameels, usually not bad to look upon, make new acquaintances readily, and when they note a desire on the part of some male or miales to exchange real money for liquor, they either supply the desired goods or lead the way to some quiet and unobtrusive apartment, where the stills are following the example of the busy bees. Occasionally ey disappear into the shadows, soon to return to the waiting customers with the promised beverages. The Village boot- legger, with a little hustle in her makeup, can pick up as much as $20 in an evening, and that is a lot of money ini the district where art flourishes, but seldom is rewarded. Further uptown, in the cabaret districts, there also are women bootleggers who will guide persons to places where they can purchase bottled hooch, or who hang about the smaller hotels in which the stag pean are held, and who see that liquor is sup- plied upon request from the celebranis. The cus- tom usually is this: As soon as one consignment of liquor is consumed, a collection is taken up and turned over to one of the women idling in the hall- way. She departs, but soon a new supply of con- traband is smuggled in, probably from some nearby dwlling: Then she returns and awaits the next order, abe lowest type of the woman bootlegger in New York City is usually of foreign birth. Her habitat is in and around ‘‘The Bend,”’ in the thor- oughfare abutting Chinatown, along the water fronts of the East and North Rivers and in other squalid sections. The stuff she peddles almost in- variably is vile, and is manufactured in some shed, basement or tenement room or behind some garage. She will sell in quantites large or small, often sup- plying some of the corner gangsters, now-a-days well dressed and pfosperous because if the new industry, who may have a hurry order to fill and not sufficient time to obtain a better grade of goods. Some of these women sell directly from sidewalk stands or dingy stores, the contraband being con- ¢ealed beneath vegetables or fruit, in cans or tubs, or behind goods upon the shelves. Others circulate about among trusted customers, making deliveries in person from bottles concealed in their clothing. Nothing more is needed to prove that women bootleggers of the so-called ‘better class’’ are almost beyond punishment than to cite a few recent cases. In these, it will be noted, the members of the weaker sex who received harsh treatment, were those who dealt in the stuff familiarly known as hooch. Mrs. Rebecca Goldberg, of Wheeling, W. Va., was sentenced to serve six months for making and selling liquor. For a considerable time she was sufficiently clever to balk the authorities, but finally they discovered that a rope running beneath a pile of dirt and rubbish was attached to a five-gallon jug of moonshine. Beneath a great mass of rags in a cellar were thirty-four quarts of alleged ‘‘bonded whiskey,”’ and a complete still was located on the premises. August Miller, the superintendent of an apartment house -in New York's fashionable West Side, had a (Continued on Page 30)
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On the upper west side, along Central Park West and the streets off Central Park West, there is a constant file of dogs on parade —poodles, chows, airdales, french bulls, terriers, pomeranians, beagles, spaniels, greyhounds, mas- tiffs and mongrels. They go leashed and unleashed, muzzled and unmuzzled, alone, in pairs, in three’s, almost, one might say, in sextettes and squads. Aside from their presence as a menace to safety, they are an annoyance because of their habits, because of their disgusting appearance when they are on leashes, or rather, the disgusting appearance that their mistresses make when they are dragging them and being dragged by them on their leashes. One cannot help thinking that the mistresses are also leashed, and that their worship at the canine shrine is a perverted expression of maternal instinct which is the result of moral defect, unanswered prayers, or successful precautionary measures. Most disgusting of all is the midnight revue, when masters and mistresses bring their dogs out for a final airing. The revue begins between ten-thirty and eleven and lasts until midnight or after. At any time during that period, one passing along Central Park West or adjacent streets may count at least one dog to a block, and sometimes there are several dogs in the same block taking their evening walk at the same time. It is a ceremony, impres- sive if not refined, and attended with some loss of dignity on the part of the owners. — ‘he dog problem in New York is more than the result of the normal affection that human beings have for dogs. ‘It is an affection that amounts almost to a mania, which may be traced in many instances, whether from misfortune or choice, to childless marriages. Maternal instinct finds expression in affection lavished on a dog more readily in New York perhaps than in communities where a more wholesome, neighborly spirit obtains. Life in a New York apartment is not a normal existence, regardless of location or what anybody says on the subject. There is no community of interest; and becaus>, where people pay rent there are fewer homes, it follows that the broad interests of the home are lacking in a larger degree than in less crowded com- munities. The atmosphere of New York is artificial to anybody born outside New York. It isan atmos- phere where such a thing as dogmania might be expected to flourish. omen who can have children but won’t have them and.who prefer dogs to children are mostly to be found in crowded cities. Their companion- ships and. their interests are limited: Their selfish- ness is their dominant trait. These women must have something besides housework and movies to keep them from being bored to death with them- selves, and to relieve the confinement of their cramped lives. And so they have dogs. Instead of starting out with other women and with their children for an afternoon in the open, they go out with their dogs for a walk in the park. . These women indulge in a pathetic jargon of dog talk. They hold long conversations with their poodles and pups, accompanied by kisses bestowed on the dogs, heads and even on their mouths. “Do oo love oo mama, Rosemary? Mama’s sweetie little baby. Mama wouldn’t know what to do without her little pet. Mama wouldn’t EW YORK is, and has been for a long time, N suffering from an epidemic of dogs. Few magazines would have the courage to print this story. When it came into the editorial offices of MIDNIGHT we debated long about it. But the problem, as stated by the writer, is with us and may not be ignored. We shall be glad to hear from our readers as to their own individual opinions on this important subject. know what to do without her ittsy bittsy sweetest. Would she Rosemary? Isn’t oo mama’s little sweet? Isn’t 00? - at’s the matter sweet? Doesn't little Rosemary feel well to-day? Let’s see the little pink tongue, Rosemary. Let’s see the little tongue. Come on, let’s see the little pink tongue, Rosemary. Let mama see if Rosemary needs the nice doctor.’ It is impossible to make a reproduction of this conversation as ridiculous as it really is. Rosemary has been spayed of course. Like her mistress, she is not to have any vulgar offspring if it can be prevented. Rosemary has a family tree, and any dog with her breeding and noble ancestry is privileged to have a few human ailments requiring medical attention. When Rosemary gets a little older she will no doubt be given the Boston Transcript to read; but just now she mustn’t be subjected to any excitemert. Possibly her mistress needs medical attention too. If the nice doctor would also prescribe something for her he would be killing two birds with one stone. Rosemary’s mama wouldn't know what to do all day without Rosemary. There you have it! She is a high type of moron. I say high type because the woman I am describing has had a common school and in some instances a college education. She isn’t a moron in the ordinary sense of the word, but she’s a moron just the same. What dothe husbands think about it? Some of them think nothing; they, too, are morons. If oneof them has ever had a normal man’s desire for children, it has been stifled. He is satisfied with the dog, or at least, he has to try to be satisfied. Gradually the.man may become as much attached to the dog as his wife. He even gets so he talks about it at the office—about the cute things it does, how it gets out of its basket in the living room early in the morning and jumps on the bed, and paws and twists and turns ae snuggles down under the clothes with him and his wife, and heaves a big sigh. It’s just like a baby, and it’s too funny for anything the way that dog snuggles down, with its head on ihe pillow, heaves a regular human sigh and goes to sleep. Some of the men at’ the office look at him and look at_each other. They have children and they bore each other more or less telling about the cute _ make a dollars-and-cents estimate. things the children do and say. But here’s a man who tells about the cute things his dog does and he talks about the dog not as if it were a dog but as if it were a baby. Can you beat it? He is out of the discussion when the others talk about their offsprings; and sometimes when he is only a listener on the fringe of the circle, he wishes wistfully that he could know the joy of picking out a football or a pee of skates or a toboggan on the way home instead of stopping for a new dog collar-or a package of milk bone. Once I overheard a woman explaining to a butcher that a reddish Pekingese she had with her was a very exclusive model. There were only six others like it in the United States, which did make it exclusive, to be sure, and put it way beyond the one-hundred or two-hundred or even five-hundred dollar class, to It was a schol- arly looking dog with a very intellectual forehead. A common three-hundred-dollar dog passing along the street would have been properly impressed and would have at once recognized that he was in the presence of royalty; and would have done nothing so vulgar as to violate dog etiquette by speaking to this member of the upper-seven aristocracy. Only a mongrel with no sense of decency would have’ made the mistake of overstepping the proprieties by insulting this Prince of Dogdom with unwarranted familiarities. | This woman had no children, but she had a Pekingese that had very few relatives, a sure sign of aristocracy; and the Pekingese rode around with her in an electric coupe and looked out on the passing show with an aloof but not patronizing air. At home it probably read the Greek classics. But there is a more serious side to the dog problem. Nearly every day we read of a dog attacking a child or an adult and often the infections which are the result of dog bites are fatal. In this connection, (Continued on Page 31)
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Fa. e Fifteen. Daughter ofa Murderer The Story of a Daughter’s Struggle to Rise From the Depths but before I go into a recital of the things that I have undergone I want to say a word or two about why I’m writing it and how I came to write it, this tale of tragedy and rehabilitation! It seems to me that this is decidedly important and has a relationship with the story itself. I have always believed that it is well for one to have a reason and a purpose for doing things. There should be a reason and a purpose at the bottom of every thing that we do and if this were the philosophy of every man ‘and woman, you may be sure that there would be less sin in the world today, less sin and less misery, fewer twisted lives and more happiness! Please understand, my dear friend, that the psy- chology or the only philosophy that I embrace is the psychology and philosophy that I have got from my own life. I know none other and while I have read most everything that has ever been written by most of the great masters who claim to have gone to life itself for their truths, yet at the same time I must confess that they haven’t taught me very much. To tell you the truth I have always been more or less of an individualist. I have tried to blaze my own trails and I have reached the stage of the game in my own life where I believe with all my heart and soul that we can never do anything big or construc- tive unless there is reason and purpose behind every- thing that we undertake. : You may say that my philosophy is all wrong. You may not agree with me in any particular. You may even say that I’m radical. You're entitled to your own convictions and I will not attempt to change them. I will only say this: My life has taught me that reason and purpose are vital things and if they hadn’t been in my life I’m sure that I would have never been writing this story. Why? Simply because I should have been like a million others of my sex who have never done anything out of the ordinary. I should have gone on like the millions of others doing commonplace, every- day sort of things, following the old, time-worn and ] HAVE been asked to write this story of my life, heavily beaten trail of mediocrity, drtting along like a derelict at sea! So when one of the editors of this magazine asked me to write this story of my life I ridiculed his request. I asked him why? Why should I write about my past, a past that is filled with tragedy and filth? I told him that I couldn’t possibly think of doing such a thing. Money was no attraction for the very good reason that I have all that I want of this world’s material goods. I refused to consider his proposition because I couldn’t see any good reason or any practical purpose in it. “But,”” he replied, ‘‘You misunderstand me. I was not thinking of the remunerative phase, the financially remunerative phase of it, Cecil, tha twas the furthest thing from my mind. It occurred to me that your story would be a contribution to American literature, a gospel of inspiration to some heart-sick, broken women whose lives are blood-red with despair. Women who are going deeper and deeper every day into the pit of shame. Ric then and there I saw through his logic and right then and there I decided to write the story. I believed that it was my duty todoso. I believed it my duty to tell my tale because I am convinced that service to others is one of the fundamentals of life and anything that any of us can do lighten the burden of our lise men and fellow. women we should do. The man or woman who points out the better way to their brother and sister and helps them to get out upon the -highroads is just as much a contributor to the progress and the preservation of civilization as the scientist, the captain of industry or any other individual who helps to make the world a better place to live in. So now to my story: Sister I have come from Hell! From the very bowels of Hell, the Hell of life! The black, inky- black life of dirt and slime and all the filthy things that all of us hate, but into which many of us unfortunately drift and stay. Some of us stay forever. Those of us in whom the will to be has perished stay forever. The more stalwart’ and A Four Part Serial by John Ww. Grey valiant only remain until the soul within us revolts and leads us out into the sunlight of better things. When I say that I’ve come up from Hell I mean just that and no more and no less. I’m not striving for theatrical phrases for my life has been so sordid and so melodramatic that there is no necessity for embellishment. First of all I was one of three children, the eldest one. I was born right here in New York, in that part of New York where there is more poverty and destitution and squalor per square inch than in any other city in the world. It was right off Christo- pher Street and Seyenth Avenue if you know where that is. Time hasn’t improved it so very much for it is still the same God-forsakef, desolated neighbor- hood that it was thirty-five years ago when I tramped its streets as a hungry, bare-footed kid. The neighborhood in which I was born and reared turned out some of the most famous under- world characters that New York City has ever known. Pickpockets and gangsters and murderers and every type of crook that you might think of. It was an atmosphere that was pregnant with degeneracy and debauchery and that I’m able to sit and write about it today from a position of prominence and distinction socially and otherwise can only be attributed to the omnipotence of the Good God himself! : Bor my mother and my fat her died before I had reached my eighteenth year so that the responsi- bility for caring for my two little sisters, aged seven and nine, was thrown upon my own immature shoulders. To be exact my mother died when I was thirteen. My father, of whom I shall have more to say later on, died when I was seventeen. My dear mother was one of the sweetest mothers that ever drew the breath of life. She was every- thing that was fine and noble and good. Poor mother carried her cross of sorrow day in and day out. Carried it and tried to smile though her heart (Continued on Page 18)
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“Page Eighteen POMIORIGHT Daughter of a Murderer (Continued from Page 15) was crushed with grief! Hot tears are squeezing their way out of my eyes as a vision of her sad, care- worn face flits accross my mind! If there is such a place as Heaven I know that she is there for if ever a woman suffered it was she. As long as I can remem- ber she ate the crusts of the bread of misery. As long as I can remember she never knew a moment’s peace or a moment’s happiness. From dawn to dawn her life was black and twisted, seared and seamed with trial and tribulation, marred with travail! Many times I woke up in the middle of the night to hear her sob and cry. It was pain and slavery and self-denial from the time that she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night in order that we three kids might have a place to sleep and a bite to eat. . My mother was good and I know that she tried to find just a little rest and beauty in life, but they never came to her, no—they never came! And now for a word picture of my father! I hardly know how to start and where to start—Well, I think that he was one of the worst fathers that ever lived. Bad every way, not one redeeming, manly quality; a rotter, a beast, a parasite, a soulless, heartless wretch! OW can I speak in such a fashion of one of my parents? fast listen to what I have to say about him and then decide for yourself whether or not I’m justified in giving expression to such senti- ments. It is no pleasure for me to be saying these things and I wouldn’t say them if I could get away from them. I can’t get away from them for they are a part of my story and this story is going to be all truths from beginning to end! ~ I suppose that I hated and loathed him, and always will, because of the way that he treated my mother. I have vivid. mental pictures and equally vivid recollections of some of the things that he did and said to my mother. Some of them were so horrible that they are indellibly engraved upon my vmind and I shall never forget them as long as I live. I am thinking of the abuse, the beatings that he gave her when he was stinking drunk. I can remember his stealing the money that'she earned taking in washing and going out to do housework. I can remember as though it were only yesterday the vile language that he used when she refused him money to get whiskey. Even today I have several scars, mementos of my efforts to prevent his beating mother. He was my father, but nevertheless I say this about him and I say it with all the enthusiasm and all the heart-felt sincereity at my command: If he isn’t in Hell, why then I question the God Almighty’s sense of Justice. He was a degenerate from the top of his twisted, whirling brain to the bottom of his crooked, stumbling feet! Yes, I know that the Lord God said: ‘Honor thy Father and thy Mother.”’ God said that and yet at the same time I know that I’m not breaking the Fourth commandment of the Master’s when I say these things about one of my parents. He was a father in name only, in‘every other way he was a dog, a mongrel with no heart and no soul and none of the things that distinguish the human being from the animal. I have no apologies to offer for anythin, that I have said or may yet say about him and { know that you’re going to agree with me before I finish with him! He was directly responsible for my dear mother’s death, for she died within ten days after he had kicked her down the stairs. He crushed my mother, lacerated her beautiful spirit and sent her to an early grave. She would probably have been livin ‘today, enjoying some of the luxuries of life that f would now be able to give her, if my father had been a man instead of a beast. _ He was drunk, paralyzed drunk, the day of my mother’s funeral. Not a tear in his blood-shot, whiskey-bloated eyes. Not a thought of contrition or an impulse of remorse in his whiskey-soaked brain. He was as hard and as unyielding as chilled steel. The grim spectre of death was no more to him than the passing of the autumn sun or the coming of dusk. He chanted no dirge over the bier of my dear mother; no lamentation, no indication of pain, no sense of loss! I can see him now sitting out in the kitchen with his head resting upon the-table oblivi- ous to the presence of the Lord of Finality. There was no change in him after mother’s death. No—no change of any kind; he still drank and still went on with his beast-like life. He put me to work in a shirt factory. A kici of thirteen past at work in a shirt factory: think of it? And then he would wait for me every Saturday night and take half of my earnings with which to get whiskey. He brought disreputable men and women into the dingy little flat that we occupied. They would sit and drink for hours at a time in an atmosphere of ribaldry and debauchery. They stayed and drank and talked until dawn when he would jerk me out of bed to prepare a bite to eat for them before I went off to the shirt factory. But God is good! Yes, God is good! He lets the wicked and the infamous run so long and no longer. God has been good to me and though he called my father as few men are called I am convinced that he merited all that the cards showed in the deck of tragedy. He drank and drank until one day he killed a policeman who was trying to arrest him for a petty theft that he had committed. He cut the poliseaen to pieces with his knife. He was tried, convicted and sentenced td be electrocuted in Sing Sing. e was sentenced to be electrocuted upon my seventeenth birthday. He did not send for me, and as the day of his death grew near, kind friends and the rrish priest persuaded me to go and see himi before he took the journey to the electric chair. As a kid of seventeen I didn’t have much understanding of the tragedy or the horror of the thing. I wasn’t able to visualize what a terrible ending confronted him. It didn’t mean very much to me in my im- mature state of mind, and I can’t say that I was very much wrought up over it; he had strangled nearly every sympathetic impulse in me by his brutalities. But -I went up to Sing Sing to see him on the day that he was to die. It is all before me now with, blood-red significance, and if I could have seen and understood as I now see and understand I might not have ever come up from Hell, as I have in the years that have flown by since that day that I walked into the death house at Sing Sing. The first effulgence of the summer sun was stream- ing up over the hills of the distant Palisades as I wended my way up the gravel walk to the big prison gate. Inthe encircling, green-capped moun- tains it had discovered a thousand birds singing their songs of love. Everywhere in that gorgeous anorama that surrounds that tomb of caged men it had discovered beauty and love and peace and sanguine, sensate life. Inside the high, gray. walls it found hate and sin, blood-stained hands, crime- ridden bodies. Men counting the ticks of the clock as they sat and waited for the time that the lightning of legal Justice would go crashing through their beings—and then the journey of their souls across the border into the still, black night and eternity! CAN see some of these men as I saw them that day. I can see them walkin; prison yard watching their small demesne of limit- less sky, looking at it with hungry, longing eyes, looking and sighing and hoping for things that were never to be theirs! They were the doomed! I can still see my father as the chaplain ushered me up to his cell. He was the same father that he had always been. Death meant nothing to him; he was still the stolid, indiferent, unthinking, unvielding man of sin: just as imimune as ever tu the soft. tender. humanizing influences of life. up and down the ‘ “Your little girl has come to say good-bye.” the old priest spoke to him. “Who in the Hell sent for you,” he snarled at me through the bars, ‘‘who in the Hell sent for you,” he repeated in a voice that was throbbing with rage. “The priest,” I began: Before I could finish he interrupted me with a string of oaths, so I turned and walked out of the death house as he hurled blasphemies at the chaplain. I shall never forget that visit to the room of the pean to the chair. No, I'll never forget it if I ive to bea million. It was one of those experiences in life that stay with one for all time. One of the experiences that dominate you and hold you. I can see the keepers sneaking along the cells with their padded feet, creeping along like a panther on the trail. I can hear the startled, terror-stricken voices mumbling their prayers, the last prayers they ~ were ever to say upon earth! I can still hear one voice that was alive with horror and fear, shouting, ‘Oh! Christ have mercy upon my soul! Oh! Christ I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” Are then a deadly hush swept over this tomb of the living dead, a hush that sent the blood trick- ling through my veins like ice water! An ague of stupefaction and fright and loneliness dominated all of them. They were silent with exhaustion and only the voice of my father punctuated the stillness of the death house as he shouted at the priest.and me. My father died as he had lived, and I subsequently learned that he went to his death cursing the chap- lain and the keepers who accompanied him to the electric chair. He fought them all to the last, fought them until the nineteen hundred volts and nine amperes went plunging through his body! He was buried by the State. There were no regrets in my heart because of his terrible ending, no, not. one single sentiment of remorse and some- how or other I really felt that his death was the beginning of a new life for me. I felt as though a burden had been lifted from my weary shoulders. Only the passing of my dear mother had left me with a thorn in my heart. She was my all in all; my father was but a memory, a memory of all that was hateful and sordid! It was not long before I began to realize what a frightful legacy I had inherited. ‘The daughter of a murderer.” That was the brand that was burned into my soul, the stigma that was applied to me by everybody in the neighborhood! That was the stain that I had to remove and the reputation that I had to live down! As a girl of seventeen I had this cross to carry, a cross that turned my hair white before I had reached my twenty-third year. My two little sisters and myself were shunned by the residents of the neigh- borhood in which we lived. We were pointed out as “daughters of Jim the murderer who had, been electrocuted at Sing Sing!”” They wouldn’t permit their children to associate with us. In their opinion we were social lepers because of the sins of our father. We were unclean things and totally unfit for any relationship with their offsprings. They ostracized us completely; we lived and moved and had our being within the confines of our dingy, little, two-room apartment. We were living in an atmosphere of philiatinism, not wholly unlike that in which Jesus lived before he passed on to Calvary. These stupid, unthinking, people treated us with utter and relentless scorn. They nailed us to the cross of censure, they would have none of us, they did not understand that it is only love and the capacity for love that distinguishes one human being from another. HEY didn't understand what Christ meant when he said to those who wanted to stone to death the woman taken in sin, ‘“‘Let him of you who has never sinned cast the first stone.” If they had thought about that they wouldn’t have thrown their stones of aversion at us: they might have loved and forgiven and realized that we were but children of the cross! Walkers upon the trail of misfortune! We packed up and got out of that environment, we couldn’t have lived without human associations and their attitude was slowly tearing the heart out of me. On more than one occasion I was on the verge of ending it all, for it seemed that the burden was becoming more and more intolerable as time flew by; it seemed that the future was getting blacker and blacker with despair! I gave up the job in the shirt factory where I had been employed for a year or more and went to work in the shipping room of the O’Neil-Adams depart- ment store. They paid me eight dollars per week. Out of this meagre wage I had to pay rent and feed (Continued on Page 30)
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“Page WVineteen Saving Souls by Jazz The Sixth of a Series of “‘Stories That Now See Print for the First Time” by a cub newspaper reporter - Are you following this series of remarkable interviews that never before saw print? UST after she had slashed her wrists with a dagger, Mary Garden told me in her dressing- room one night how t6 save the soul of the ‘American nation from going straight to hell. “To escape perdition, this country has got to saturate itself with jazz.” At the time of this little adventure with one of the most capable and beautiful women of all history— personally I rank Mary far above Cleopatra—the word ‘jazz’ was not yet born into the American Peebulaes We spoke of syncopation and rag- time. It was in that season when Victor Herbert's musical drama of the American Indian “Natoma” was being touted about as the long-awaited great American opera. Its production in our local music hall was looked forward to as a social and musical triumph. All the most scandalous old dowagers and their equally scandalous progeny were spread out in the boxes. If I am not mistaken the Stotesbury’s had run over from Philadelphia and old Mrs. Stotes- bury’s head was weighted down with the. biggest bandeau of sparklers the local populace had ever beheld. The word was passed around that the famous Stotesbury diamonds were in the audience and that Sherlock Holmes himself was acting as her personal body-guard. Wielding a wicked baton in the orchestra was no less a conductor than: the composer himself, the great and only Victor Herbert and the star of the evening was Mary Garden. The performance was nearing the thrilling climax of the second act—a dance with daggers by Natoma, the unhappy Indian heroine. In accordance with Below—Mary Gar- den herself — an exclusive photo- graph of the famous diva the best dramatic and operatic traditions, Miss Gar- den had smeared her face and neck and shoulders and arms and wrists with a thickish brown pigment to make her look like a young squaw. In her hands were two glittering blades which she swung devilishly dangerously. The pounding, thumping, barbaric music of the orchestra was rising toward a delirious criss, when suddenly the singer tottered, lost her balance and fell—the blade of one knife gashing her forearm cruelly. The curtain was lowered instantly. Although I was only a cub reporter I had been in the newspaper business long enough to know by this time that there is one thing a music critic knows nothing about (and only one, I believe) and that is news. : I was in the theatre because it was my night off. I looked across the aisle at our own music critic and saw that he was deeply engaged in conversation with a fat old maid beside him on the subject of melodic intervals. Mary's injury had eodblad him not at all. In fact, I imagine he was sitting with his finger tips pressed together and his eyes closed, listening to the music. Perhaps he doesn’t know yet that an accident happened. I went back stage and found my way to Miss Garden’s dressing-room. There she was holding out her arm from which the blood was flowing pro- fusely while Victor Herbert, whose enormous bulk was quivering with worry as he was emptying some peroxide of hydrogen from an exceedingly diminu- tive bottle held in his very large hand. Miss Garden looked over toward the door and smiled at me. “You area reporter,” she said accusingly. ‘‘Here’s a chance for you to write up my heroism, but I'd much rather you interview me instead.” “All right,” I replied, “‘tell me about the future of American music. Will there ever be a distinctly national music in the United States?” “Of course there will!’ she responded quickly. “Tt will be—ouch! that hurt, Mr. Herbert—it will be ragtime.”’ “Ragtime!’”’ I exclaimed. ‘‘Is it possible that you approve of rag- time?” “T just love it!’ she confessed. ‘‘I think it’s the most wonderful music in the world. No one is a real musician whose pulses fail to quicken at the jiggly hivehnis of jy There is something basic, funda- mental_and Mewueitok =e little bit easier, Mr. Herbert—in ragtime and it is the real expression of the American spirit. The great’ composers of America will write ragtime songs for the concert artist, ragtime trios and quartets for chamber music, ragtime poems and ragtime symphonies—yes, and ragtime operas. You needn’t look startled. I hope the day will come when I can sing the lead- ing role ina ragtime opera!”’ It was perhaps ten years ago that Mary Garden made that astonishing. confession to me. Now the rumor is rippled down the Rialto that this gorgeous Titian-haired, golden- voiced woman is thinking of sitting down at the same piano with Irving Berlin and writing a jazz opera. Think of it! The seductive Thais, the glorious Tosca, the wonderful Louise, the daring Salome, the magnificent artist who has interpreted the most fervent and the most moving feminine figures in opera, is to clasp hands with the composer ors Alexander a Ragtime Band!” Some people say they don’t believe it, but when Mary Garden says a thing she generally means it, and that is what she said to me.
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Page Jwent: GEAR a Did the Parson Love The Naughtiest Girl In America? “Ny poor little trunk!’ ” sighed Margie. The pain of it came back to her after thirteen years. “My poor little trunk! They smashed it down on the street, and I remember how all my things tum- bled out. Three little shirts, all my ribbons and. pretty clothes down in the dirt. “] was crazy with anger. I cried and cried. “‘That’s a dirty trick!’ I yelled at the boys who had done it. “Never mind, Margie,’ one of the girls said. ‘You can put your things in my trunk.’”” “Good for her!”’ I was startled to hear my young student exclaim fervently. ‘If it should happen today, Margie, I’d say the very same thing.” Then he jumped and blushed, realizing with a vague sense of discomfort that he had committed some sort of a blunder. But he got his nerve quickly as he added— “Anyhow I’d like to have smashed those pays “Oh, they were alright,” laughed Margie. ‘‘They had to do it. We couldn’t take the risk.” “Don’t you see,” I said aside to the parson. “There’s a kind of religion in it. They can’t fly in the face of their gods.” “IT don’t know what you mean by that,” said Margie. ‘‘But anyhow I was a good girl. And now I had to work all the harder because I had to save money to buy myself a new trunk. “Yes, I was a good girl,’ she repeated. “‘I’ll never forget Lola Milton,” she stopped to laugh. “Lola Milton, of Milton’s Musical Act that was with the show. She was mother to all the girls, and took special care of me because I was so little. Every night she would give me an orange if I would come straight back from the show and not go out with the boys. “Finally we got as far as Salt Lake City—And what do you think (he She turned her merry face full upon our parson, who was leaning toward her, his face wreathed in friendly smiles. . “What do you think ?—An old Mormon wanted to marry me!” “The plagued old rascal!’’ growled the parson. ~ “Yes, he wanted to marry me,” rippled Margie. “That was my very first offer. He was taking another girl and me all around the city, showing us the Temple, and all that. He said he was very rich. He was awful solemn when he asked me to marry him. He said he had seven wives. I would be his eighth wife, he told me, but he said I would be his favorite.” “T told him yes—”’ began Margie, and the dominie jumped again. “op told him ‘yes,’’’ Margie went on. “That might be a good idea, but I'd telegraph my mother first to find out what she thought about it. “So I strung him along for a few days, and then told him my mother had wired that she couldn’t see her way clear to letting me marry him.” “Tell me,” he asked her. ‘What about this grim and terrible side to stage life we hear so much about? Is that side true, too, as well as the jolly side? These stories of suffering, privations, poverty, despair, ruin—are these stories true? Have you known cases like that? The girls always seem so bright and care-free on the stage. Is this other side true, too, the dark side of suffeting—and death?” “She said, “Oh, yes. It istrue.’”’ And she promised to tell me some of these tales when I wanted to listen. “But Margie had missed all this apparently,”’ I told him. ‘When I say I can’t reprove her for what she is and for what she does I don’t mean that J would advise all young girls to try to follow in her footsteps. There is only one Margie—" My young friend nodded prompt and hearty assent to that. “Yes,” Margie was saying now. “I turned down that Mormon, and so far I had dodged the stage Johns. Lola Milton took good care of that. “But out at Denver,”’ she confessed, ‘One of the other girls and I did go out with a couple of ohns. “We had chileton catne and hot tamale, and it was great fun. We said we had to go back to the hotel and they asked if we wouldn’t go out with them later. We said we would and told them to wait in the lobby. They waited, and we went up to the balcony and laughed and made faces at them while they were waiting. They didn’t see us, and we went to bed, leaving them there waiting. “Finally we got back to New York, and I went with a show at old Miner’s on the Bowery. One of the girls dared me to make up my face for a comic. (Continued from Page 8) She had stayed out all night, so she was AFRAID TO GO HOME. What Did She Do? Next week’s MIDNIGHT tells you We were supposed to be’ all dolled up, and used to swing out over the audience. But I wouldn't take a dare. Anyhow I was never afraid of the bosses. They were all kind of afraid of me because I had a quick temper and usually,did as I pleased. “So I painted my nose bright red and smeared on a regular comedy make-up, and went swinging out with the rest. “After the act Helen Russell, wife of the boss and the leading lady of the show, lit on me something terrible. “ ‘How dare you doa thing like that,’ she yelled at me. ‘You've got to behave.’ ” ; “Oh, is that so?’ I said, and ran away again. I never showed up any more for that bunch. But I was afraid to go home and tell my folks I had left the show. I got a job right away with the Golden Russian troop-—but I got out of that eerty, quick, too, because T poulia’s obey orders. e had been practicing hard, and when the night of the opening came up on Loew's Roof I was so crippled from practicing I was afraid I couldn’t go on. I had a solo dance to do, and didn’t see how I could get through it. The manager had told us we would soon be touring Europe and that we would all get rich. We were all supposed to be Russians; sang all Russian songs and were ordered not to be heard speaking a word of English. And hete I was all crippled up so I couldn’t go on. ““Oh Margie, you must go on,’ the boss said. ‘I ain't got one woman solo in the act. Please try.’ “So,” said Margie, ‘Crippled or not, I went on, and danced a mile a minute. I forgot all about being crippled. “But a few nights later I got in trouble again. There was a strong man on the program and he started to talk to me, and I talked to him. And I got the devil for talking English when we were supy dd to be green Russians. And I got fired. “The next job was Coney Island. And here we ied into lots of trouble with the police. Captain ooley came into the place one night and said to Mother Inman, mother of Johnnie Inman who ran the show— ‘ “I'm sorry, Mrs. Inman, but you've got to get some of them girls out of the show. They’re too cai ‘ ‘“‘‘Here’s where I get the bum’s rush again,’ I thought. I was heart-broken again. It seemed every place I went } got put out. “ Anyhow he told us all to come around to the station house the next day. - “ ‘Hello, Cutie,’ said the captain when it came my turn. ‘How old are you?’ ‘I'm eighteen,’ I said, never batting an eye. “Don’t lie to me,’ said Captain Dooley.’ Margie chuckled about it these dozen years after. “Anyway—they’re all dead now,’ she mused. i Well,’ the captain said, bring your folks down here, and if they say its all right you can work.” ee American ‘stage owes a debt to Margie’s father and mother, who would not stad in the way of the determined girl, who was going to dance in burlesque though the heavens fell and all the jail doors in the world yawned to swallow her up. Father Pennetti came down from Prince Street THIEVES! A thrilling, nerve-strain- ing play in one act — complete in next week’s MIDNIGHT to the Island, talked with Mother Inman and Cap- tain Dooley and said he had no objection to his Sa pee continuing at work. The captain ordered that they must all wear long dresses, and, as appeared later, gave his men special orders to keep on the lookout as to what the girls did after the show. “One night,” said Margie, “I was eating in a restaurant and a waiter came over and said, ‘There's a swell chap over here that wants to meet you.’ “T looked over at him. He was a big, tall fellow, and I told the waiter to bring him over. “T was getting $15 a week, and had to pay Mother Inman $5 for a room and most all the rest went for meal-tickets. I usually had about one meal-ticket left before pay day—but not a nickel beside. It all went for ice cream, candied pineapple—and other candy. ‘Anyhow, here comes over the tall guy, and says: “ “How'd you like to have some Chop Suey?’ “I had never eaten Chop Suey, but I told him I would like some, fine. “We started out, and I felt very proud goin along with the big John. But a cop came up an grabbed my shoulder. “Where you going?’ he said. “I'm going to get some Chop Suey,’ I told him. “Oh no, you ain’t,’ he said, ‘you're going home.’ And he took me home and waited till I got upstairs. I cried and cried again, just as I did when they broke my trunk at Montreal. “Just about that time I met my first husband. He was manager of a cabaret show. I really married him for spite! I was only fourteen, and all the girls got sore when I told them a guy wanted me to marry him. They didn’t think he really would marry me, and I knew he would, so I told hiss yes, and we got married. “His name was Sam Shaw, and I lived with him four years. But I got away from him. He didn’t have enough pep for me, never got ahead with anything. Part of the time I was with him I was on the stage, part of the time in cabarets. I sang and danced in a Chicago cabaret, and for a while at the Pekin, here in New York. We kept. house down at Preeti on Seventeenth Street and Surf Avenue. “Then Frank Calder got me. He was manager of the High Life Girls and I was in the show.” I noticed a new note in her voice, and determined to find out more. ‘Have you ever been in love, Margie? Did you really care for these fellows, for any one of them?” ‘Yes.”” I could not see her eyes, but there was a uiver in her voice. ‘‘Yes—I did care for that one, the one that died. Yes, I guess I loved him—” But I did not want her to lose the thread of her story. ‘Tell us about him, and about the show,” I prompted. “Well, he was a regular guy, and it was a good show. We played New York, and went on the road. And it took everywhere. I was the boss’s wife, and the star, so you can guess I just about had things my own way—”’ “But that was nothing very new, was it?” I laughed. ‘‘It sounds to me you have had things your own way pretty much all the time.” “Yes, I guess I have,’’ she chuckled. “But Frank died,” she went on. “I owned the show, then, and I went right on with it.” “You, the boss of a show!”’ I said. ‘I never knew that before. So you can manage, as well as sing and dance!”’ : “Of course. It’s all in the game. 1 just do what has to be done, as it comes along. We traveled as far as Kansas City, all through the East, and down South, the whole American circuit. We were billed as ‘Michalina Pennetti and Her High Life Girls.’ “Then back in New York, when I was playing for old Kraus at the Olympic I met Billy Hoberg. He layed drum in his mother’s restaurant over on hird Avenue, and managed the place. He wanted me, and I was lonesome, and I said ‘yes.’ “But that didn’t last so long,’’ Margie sighbd, and I thought I perceived my friend the parson give a start. But I may have been mistaken. “TI suppose some fellows have been quite foolish about you,” I ventured. “Yes, one man was 80 foolish he took poison.” “Tell us about that,”’ I urged. “No, I'd better not. It was long ago, but he was quite a prominent guy, a lawyer. And his brothers are living yet. But why should he have . done that? What good did that do him? They couldn’t all have me.” (Continued on page 30)
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HQ) can caclulate the value of a kiss? A kiss. The humming bird kisses the heart of the honeysuckle bloom; the dawn’s sunbeams kiss the dew, and moonbeams kiss the whispering waves upon the surf; the mother kisses the cheek—soft as rose petals—of her sleeping baby; the bridegroom kisses the lips of his radiant bride, the school boy the lips of his roguish sweetheart; the man the lips of his mistress. What statistician dare calculate these ecstasies? What accountant dare estimate their worth? Day after day the matter comes up. A kiss has been stolen. The thief must pay. How much? Kisses $15,000 each. Or $25,000. Or six cents. So runs the news. The other day a theatre proprietor was sued for $15,000 because one of his performers in the course of his act came down from the stage and kissed a lady of the audience. And some years ago a New York lady sued her doctor for $50,000 for two kisses—$25,000 each. Yet a New Jersey jury once fixed the valuation of a kiss at six cents. The lady had sued the kiss thief for $300. More baffling than the problem of the kiss’s worth is the deeper problem of the workings of a woman’s mind. The other night a girl in a burlesque show was singing a tantalizing song, the burden of which was ‘‘Come and Kiss Me.” She singled out a nervous young man in the audience and sang the song directly at him. She stretched out her arms; she puckered her lips; she taunted and inflamed him —‘'‘Come and Kiss Me!’’ ‘Come and Kiss Me!” What would any self-respecting man do, young or old? He dashed from his seat, leaped through the orchestra and across the footlights—and did as he was commanded: And the indignant young woman had him arrested, saying in court that he ought to have known that she was only. fooling. co Rage Fwenty One _ a stolen Riss They used to say that a kiss was—nothing, divided by two. If it is half of nothing, how on earth can it be worth any- thing—and yet homes have been and_ hearts wrecked broken because of a stolen kiss. These amusing reflections by Edgar F. Stone will be sure to entertain you. How could he know? On the other hand, there was that charming young Parisienne who was showing Mark Twain and his friends about the gracious city long ago, whom the Doctor asked for a kiss. He wanted the kiss badly, but was very business-like about it. He offered her a franc for a kiss. The young woman was business- like as well as the doctor, and let him have it, figuring that after he had taken that one she would still have just as many left. Just as many left. Why then are they so hugely valuable—all the way up to $25,000. One of the learned judges called upon to settle a baffling kiss case laid down the proposition that a woman’s mouth, with all that appertained thereto, was her own property, and that no man had right to tresspass thereupon without her expressed consent. A kiss is such a tiny thing. Its taking may require merely the hundredth part of a second—yet the consequences, who can forsee? Some years ago a western town was almost dis- rupted, and in fact partly destroyed by a kiss—and only a kiss behind the ear. A fervent young parson had been holding evangc listic services, bringing the inhabitants by thie s ore to piety and repentance. One of his converts, a blooming young girl, called upon him in the -an: : ity of his study, to talk over some matter of her cv perience or her part in the church work. The young ascetic pondered, agitated enraptured: “How can I adequately describe sin and warn against it if I do not find out fromi personal experience what sin is lik;?” Satan tempted him and he did kiss. He meant to do far more, the inference later was, but at least he stole a kiss. It was a sudden kiss, but the girl was more sudden than the kiss, for she dodged—and the kiss, intended for her ripe lips, fell upon her white neck, just behind the ear. Timidly she whispered the dreadful secret to a girl chum. The chum told her parents. Those parents told the first girl’s parents. Then the church knew; then the town knew. The minister was tried, in both the county and the church courts. Soon the whole state was aflame. Settlers drove many miles to attend the court room hearings. The young minister went bravely forward with his preaching, while defending himself by day in the court room. and HE town took sides. The feud grew. The man was exonerated by the courts but dismissed by the church. Passions grew fiercer. Members of one clique actually burned the houses .of members of the other. The minister departed, and the poor girl, in amazement and chagrin at the havoc that had been wrought about her fell ill, and died. All because of a kiss behind the ear. How much was it worth? What lies back of this inexplicable sensitiveness about the right of a woman to bestow her kisses where and when she pleases? And sometimes, but far more rarely, it is a woman who acknowledges that the kisses of a man are precious. Just the other day intimate letters were : (Cantinued on Page 28)
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TPage Twenty Fw These thrills are entered in the great MIDNIGHT Thrill Contest for $500.00 in prizes. See page 2 My Greatest UNDER THE MIDNIGHT MOON Ge over the water the pale moonlight spotting the waves—what a place and time for romance—if only my darling were there. Two hands clasped my shoulders. , “He is not worth it, little girl,” came a sinister voice. : “He is worth a million such sacrifices,”’ I replied. “Well, I have sworn not to expose him, but you are worth it.” I suffered myself to be led into the brightly lightedcabin. [watched this man finish my cocktail and his own, a beast of a man, a beast! To think in his hands was knowledge enough to ruin the one man I loved. What was I doing? Had I lost my mind? I was not sure that this was the way to save Wilson. Perhaps the secret had already been told. I saw rpeslt beaten and torn, unloved and accused by the man I hoped to save. _It was all some horrible joke, I wasn’t saving anyone. I was merely destroy- ing myself! Even if there were truths in the things this man knew about my darling, there were no proofs. I was a fool. The cabin door! I walked slowly, lest he guess my motive, toward the open door! “Let’s go out and see how the moon makes the waters seem to dance!”’ I was playing for time, to think of what to do! Something suddenly, madly, appealed to the beast as I climbed to the deck, for I found myself strug- ling uselessly in his arms: I could feel his hot, everish breath, as I was drawn closer to his ugly, fascinating mouth—I heard the clock strike, slowly, twelve times—I jumped with a_ start—finding myself pressed closely against the wall of the room— safe in my own little bed! Hortense Hall. Moving cautiously around we came upon a boy crying. At intervals he got up and called out, ‘‘Bill, Bill, come here.” IN THE BLACK NIGHT Ge WAS midnight on a very foggy night that my brother and self were returning from a friend’s house where we had spent the evening. We were riding bicycles or rather we were pushing them and walking at the time, as the fog was so thick and the night so black that we found it im- possible to pedal our machines. Groping our way along as best we could by the aid of our cycle lamps, which however were little good to us, we suddenly saw a dark mass on the ground at our feet. It moved! Stepping quickly back, we concentrated the rays of our lamps upon it and found it to be a fallen korse attached to an over-turned milk cart. He pointed to underneath the cart, saying, ‘‘My pardner Bill’s under there and he can’t get out.” Then he resumed his crying. Detaching our lamps, we carefully looked and saw the feet of a man sticking out from under the cart. Finding it impossible to move the cart without help, one of us went for a doctor and the other for the police. After great difficulty we succeeded in finding both. When the cart was removed the man was found to be dead. He presented a horrible sight. The circumstances of the black night, the deadening thick fog and the sudden apparition of the horse, made the incident so eerie and weird that neither of us has ever forgotten it. E. R. W. More Thrills on Page 29 this issue. “TELL IT TO THE JUDGE!” ESS SetHine seemed perfect until midnight when we reached 138th Street and Broadway, where three young men appeared and jumped on the running board of the car with revolvers, demanding us to stop, which we did. Tardy was very nervous and immediately exclaimed that they could have what he had on his person. I Geyaclt wae not any too comfortable. The men demanded that we step from the car, opening the back door where my two friends were sitting. Clinger was the first to step out. He is about twenty-six years of age, about 5 feet 5 inches (shorter than any of the three hold-up men). As soon as he was on the street, he said: “Don’t be afraid boys, see the two policemen at the corner ?’’ With that the hold-up men looked around and Clinger let go with a beautiful left jab which caught the biggest of the three and sent him over to the side- walk, the other two made a dash up 138th Street and Clinger jumped in the car and shouted for me to speed up Broadway, which I did not hesitate doing until we reached 153rd Street. where we were met by a motorcycle policeman to whom: we explained our case, but he said: ‘That's the best one I've heard yet, but here’s your pass to tell the Tudge the story,’ taking the number of the car and handing mea ticket. The following morning at 10:30 a. m. matters were explained to the Judge and our dismiss was granted, so we had a good break both ways. E. Norbert. THE MYSTERIOUS TRUNK F THERE'S anything that gets on my nerves, it's a trunk murder mystery. I had read of a case earlier in the day, and as I sat alone on the front veranda of my summer cottage that night, my thoughts were still centered on the above subject. I was all alone, as the men folks had not yet returned from the city. Oh, how I wished they were there. I was in a quandary. I was afraid to go into the house and equally afraid to sit out on the porch. I looked at my watch, and by the bright moonlight I saw it was close to midnight. As I sat there a machine moved swiftly up the road and stopped opposite my home. Two men quietly alighted, and to my surprise, I saw them lift a large trunk from the car. I noticed too that the trunk was heavy, from the manner in which they carried it. After looking about to see that there was no one in sight (they didn’t see me, as I was behind some shrubbery), they swiftly deposited the trunk behind a clump of elderberry bushes and quickly departed. 1 was sure it contained a human body murdered by some fiend. with fright. All was silent as the grave. I heard the clock in the house chime the hour of twelve. After a few more minutes of waiting, which seemed hours to me, the men came home at last. I almost cried for joy, so glad was I at their return. - I told them what I had seen. They investigated, pried open the trunk, and instead of a dead body, found it loaded with hooch. Elizabeth Ramsey Longenecker. I almost collapsed
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“Page Jwenty Three HE woman was dead. Helverston stvod for a long minute ga/iniy, stonily down at the still, wasted features; distorted features that once had glowed with health and sparkled with beauty and flamed with the fire of youth. His own face was sphynxlike, as one who has run the gamut of human emotions, then slowly petrified. The cheap little clock on the mantel ticked with clacking insistence; the raucous hilarity of ragged urchins in the alley under the window rasped the air; the scurrying steps of shop-girls home from their work clattered on the rickety stairs + but Helverton heard only the lethargic thumping of his dead heart. The bed in the corner was unmade, and cluttered with a tawdry heap of discarded clothes; two or three crude chairs stood at incongruous angle about the stuffy little room and the dying sun thrust ghostly, jaundiced fingers through the cracks in the shutters. But the man still standing there saw alone the spectral vision of his crucified life. More and more and more minutes passed. Mid- night had struck in Helverston’s soul. Then out of the blackness slowly dawned. a faint flicker of light. His frozen body struggled to relax, his numb brain strained against its chains. With stumbling steps he turned, groping blindly for foothold. In a little anteroom he sat down by himself—to think. For hours he sat there, too absorbed in the thoughts that had taken shape at last to heed the coming and going of neighbors in the death chamber —persons actuated only by motives of curiosity, of course; for always they had kept apart, aloof, from others. The long night Maes 0 neither eating nor sleep- ing, Helverston stayed there alone with his thoughts. And with daybreak came tranquillity. It was as though the frightful toxic ameeba that had sucked him into its destroying tentacles—annulling reason, atrophying mind, paralyzing wilH—had passed like some horrible nightmare, leaving only its noxious shadow to slime his brain. In the ravel of memory’s back-lash, every thread came clear; the woman's unholy lure, the blinding passion that gripped him; the merciless thong of realization—disillusionment, hatred, degradation— trampling one another's heels in sordid and hideous procession. And now at last, Death—grim solvent of all earthly woes! Death, the deliverer, flinging out its shining life line to his shipwrecked soul! Back he came, with repentance in his heart, to the woman he had deserted. Was she waiting for him? Was she ready to take him in her arms and forgive? Nellie C. Gillmore’s little epic bares a human soul for you “I’m sick of my buried alive existence, Jim; tired of being—cheated . . He wasfre> . . free atc Convulsed face buried in his arms, Helverston had sobbed mutely through his racking travail; and after tranquillity came the birth of new life. He thought of Margaret, the Woman He Had Left Behind; Margaret, his wife; the metal he had scorned for glittering dross! His trembling lips formed her name, and in his humility it seemed to him that even the husky utterance was profanation of sacred things. But Margaret was a woman, al/ woman; and women—forgave! * * * * NSIDE of a week, Helverston had started on his journey. He would not try to exculpate himself; he had not fallen that low. But he would kneel to her as before a shrine, pleading for her pity, her mercy, if she would hear him—her forgiveness. In a strange, detached way he felt that he was acting, not from his own volition, but driven onward by some tre- mendous, higher force, as a fallen leaf is swept onward by a storm-gust till some sheltering haven is reached. K was midnight when he reached his journey’s end. Five years had brought many changes to the little town Helverston had once claimed as his home. Whitewashed cottages had been replaced by artistic bungalows; smart residences and apart- I want—you.” ments imposed along the main avenue; corner “stores’’ had given place to up-to-date shops. The clang of car-bells and the flare of electric lights Struck oddly on the prodigal’s eyes as he gazed stupidly about him in quest of a familiar landmark. Bewildered, he was forced to rely purely upon his sense of direction to guide him to the old familiar neighborhood. Instinctively he turned to the north. Nor did his intuition fail him, for abruptly—after fifteen minutes’ steady walking—by the regiment of tall, silver-leaved poplars swaying in the night- wind, he established his bearings. The vacant lot over which they had once held stately guard had been converted into a picturesque modern park, while just a square beyond was—home! Helverston walked more slowly now, hope, rear, tugging alternately at his heart-strings. And as he reached the well-remembered spot, his eyes clouded and his face fell. Instead of the little white cottage whose fragrant picture hung in his memory, his startled vision rested upon a brownstone mansion set off by luxurious landscape appointments! Marking the entrance was a broad, oblong slab of polished granite, and by the pallid light from a hunter’s moon, he gazed dully at the letters carved upon it. J. MORTON HARRINGTON, M. D. But Margaret—what of her?
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“Page FJwent Pad A sudden feeling of sick dread stole over him. Now for the first time the talons of Doubt tore him. What had become of her? Had she gone away, where he could not find her?) Was sh ee not, what had been her fate? Had his wanton cruelty and treachery driven her to—to—God only knew what! His fear lashed him to desperation. Question after question—beyond all reason—pounded against his tortured brain. Remorse plied its stinging cat- o’-nine tails. Minutes, like eons, he stood there—dumb, dazed —a terrible blankness all about him. Then slowly, by degrees, his turgid thoughts cleared and aut of the chaos came a shred of hope. The hope grew to certainty; in his relief he almost smiled, tears coling his burning eyes. It was all very simple; she ha gone to her people—or friends; after his desertion of her, it was absurd to suppose she would have remained in the little nest alone! A dim light gleamed from one of the downstairs rooms of the house; perhaps some of the occupants were still stirring, could give him definite informa- tion of Margaret’s present whereabouts. At least he could imate the trial. His courage returned; he passed suickly through the small iron gate, hurrying along the tortuous, concrete walk leading to the steps. On either side, he was screened from view by overshadowing borders of jassamine, and as he neared the house the sudden crunching of footsteps on the gravel driveway to the left, halted him sharply. Slipping cautiously behind a clump of ical aa he hel his breath, waiting, presentiment bringing a curious warning that all was not right. The newcomer hastened swiftly toward the porte cochére, casting furtive glances about him as he went. And almost ‘at the same moment, a woman emerged noiselessly through one of the floor windows and paused in the shadow of wistaria that curtained the porch. Vaulting the low rail, the man called in a cautious undertone. A soft voice answered, in low, musical accents that could belong to no other woman in the world. Margaret! Helverston edged closer, so close that every whis- pered word was distinctly audible. “Are you all ready, dear? I left the car around the corner, for safety’s sake; I waited till I saw Harrington board the train—and saw the train pull out. e must hurry if we want to make that two o’clock ferry and reach New York by sun up. You —you don’t regret, Margaret?” he laughed—a tinkling little laugh that to the listening man’s taut ears was threaded through with weariness, with bitterness. Her’ words were proof: “Regret! I’m sick of my buried-alive existence, Jim; tired of being—cheated. Harrington is a good man after his fashion—and-after his fashion, good to me. But I've never cared for him—that way, as I love you—and his cold austerity and self-absorp- tion are killing me. I regret nothing, jim: I want to live; I want—you. Does that satisfy you?” Helverston moistened his dry lips with a drier tongue. Through the dense foliage where a patch of light showed he could see the man-take the agitated woman in his arms and kiss her feverishly, repeatedly; could see the look in the upturned eyes, the tender face all white with suppressed emotion. And suddenly she withdrew from his embrace, pressing a package into his hands. ‘‘These are my diamonds. I'll get my satchel and wraps.” “We've no time to spare, Margie; our steamer sails at six.” She disappeared into the house and thrusting the box into his packet, the man took a couple of nervous paces back and forth. Helverston crept forward an inch. Vibrating in every nerve, brain flaming, he flung off the torpor of horror that had gripped him. His cold hand fumbled at his hip pocket; the sunken eyes dilated. A little smile twisted his lips as he reflected upon an old prowess; the unerring trueness of his aim. He had no time to think; he could only feel, feel. It was the one restitution he could make to the woman he had wronged; just such a passion as held her now had bruised and shattered and damned his soul; it should never leave its withering blight on hers! He raised the automatic, fired. The bullet went home. Without even a moan the man crumpled to the floor inert. Helverston replaced the still smoking weapon in his pocket and made his way through the bushes toward the side entrance. A's he reached the open, an officer ran toward him; from another direction came a second. Then—Margaret! He made a pretense of dodging, dropped—pierced in a vital spot. The dulling eyes were riveted upon the woman's wax-white face; in his own changed features and husking voice she would never—know. “Yes, by God! I killed him—and I’m glad I did. We were pals F there to rob Harrington's house while he was away. I put him wise to the haul . and he double-crossed me . . . . and tried to make away with—the diamonds. . A and leave meinthelurch ....I1.... 1” The last gurgling words trailed to a whisper, broke— stopped. Helverston was dead. Fanny Brice and Geo. M. Cohan (Continued from Page 11) said excitedly. ‘Then you can see us do our turns from the wings and when it comes time for you to go on you can beat it!’ “The idea seemed all right to us. ‘Gee!’ I thought to myself. ‘Such a brain!’ We did as we were told, gave in our names and took our places with the other contestants. “The show started. One by one the boys did their stunts and the line in front of me began to get shorter and shorter. Each time I saw another leave the stage I'd say to the manaper cet hen is it my turn? hen do I go on?” Meaning of course to slip out just before my turn came. He mistook my queries for impatience and the last time I put the question to him, he yelled in my ear: “It’s your turn now, kid! Go on! Do your worst!’ He helped me along with one mighty push and I found myself out on the stage before a crowded house. “T stood rooted to the floor and gazed around with my mouth wide open. The people thought | had stage fright and some people from our block who knew me called from the gallery, ‘Go ahead, Fanny! Don’t be afraid.’ “T looked up at them, those friends in the gallery, then down at the orchestra and said, ‘All right, if you want me to, I'll sing a song.’ “The orchestra played a popular hit of the day and I began. When I stopped the audience ap- plauded and my friends in the gallery shrilled, ‘Give us another one, Fanny: “T sang another and began to feel so comfortable and so much at home on the stage that they couldn’t drag me off. Say, I just adopted that stage! When the contest was over, I had won the prize. It wasa ten dollar bill. Was I surprised, thrilled, happy? Well, I guess! With that ten-dollar bill in hand [ made a dive for the door and started to run for home. Hannah wasat my heels shouting; ‘Whackie! Whackie!’ which meant ‘divide.’ I handed her the twenty-five cents I had for admission and to this day I ‘kid’ her about the quarter I once gave her.” Mann laughed gleefully like a child, the pathetic note in her voice still dominant. “Well, after that I was ‘among those present’ at evéry amateur contest from the Battery to the Bronx, and I always managed to come away victorious. “Having become such a riot in amateur circles, I decided that it was nothing less than my duty to go on the stage. I owed it to the dear public and all that—you know.” Fanny eyed herself critically in the mirror before which she sat. Who Fiddles While New York Burns? An article that’ll make you hold your breath In next week’s MIDNIGHT “I actually persuaded myself that I ought to go on! If I remained in private life think of what the public would be missing! I was sure I was doing the right thing by them. I knew I was! I didn’t know that when I got older I’d know less. “That fall, George M. Cohan was casting a musical show. I thought: ‘Here’s where I give Georgie the chance of his life! Just think! Real talent walking in to him! Surely, if the man’s right, he'll grab me!’ “Confident as you Amsterdam Theatre. and we were all lined up on the stage. nearest the piano and on a level with Me ea lease 1 applied at the New here were several girls there I stood Cohan’s r. “The lyrics of a song were given out. We all sang together, but I, wanting to show what I could do, held on to the last note of each line longer than the others and sang as though the show belonged to me. “When we finished the chorus, I looked tri- umphantly at Mr. Cohan. Of course he’d say, ‘Give this girl a part.’ Did he? He did not! “What he did say was, ‘Say, you! Don’t hold those notes so long! You're crabbing the whole number!’ “Think of that blow to a budding genius. Me— who was going on the stage to give the public a treat! : “T can laugh now, but at the time it wasn’t funny!” I had just seen the audience literally go wild over Fanny Brice and somehow I couldn’t imagine that it had not always been so. There is no suggestion of effort in her stage work. It just seems to be naturally and spontaneously amusing. “The time came when we were tried out for danc- ing,” resumed Miss Brice. ‘‘Now I knew less about dancing than a mule does about music! But I was there to be tried out—and I wouldn’t go out without all the /ry that was coming to me. Again we stood in line. A man’s voice cried, ‘Girls, put out your left foot!’ “Now to me, at that time, there was no such thing as a ‘left’ foot and a ‘right’ foot. It was just foot—and—foot. Honestly, I had never heard feet called by any other name than just foot. “T looked helplessly at the girl next to me and did as she did. But when the man tried a couple of George M’s famous buck-and-wing steps, I knew all was over with me. My feet just wouldn't move! “Mr. Cohan looked the line over. I felt his eyes rest longest on me and my heart began to ‘pinch.’ I heard him say, ‘Let her go!’ and he pointed an accus- ing finger at me. “T was stunned! I ran down to the dressing room and cried for hours. I thought my heart would break. Finally I got up and went home, a sadder and much wiser girl from the one who had started out so confidently that morning, magnanimously intending to give the world a treat by letting it see and Feat me. I had figured my salary and all the things I’d do with it. I guess I had spent a couple of thousand dollars in my mind that morning between the Bronx and the New Amsterdam Theatre. ““My mother opened the door and looked at me inquiringly. ‘I didn’t get the job.’ I said, ‘because— I was too thin.’ “T couldn’t tell her the truth. I was too ashamed. Again I burst into tears and refused to be comforted. I could almost cry now remembering how I felt. Funny, isn’t it?” Fanny’s bright eyes became momentarily sad. “But I recovered and my nerve wasn't quite all gone. I remembered that I’d been pushed on the stage and it was going to take more than little Georgie Cohan to push me off! “A few weeks later I heard that a Burlesque Show was going on the road. I determined to try my luck again. I applied for a job in the chorus and was given a place in the last row. ‘Many times since, I’ve been glad I began in the last row of a chorus. I’ve seen people start at the top of the ladder. They never stay there. I’ve seen them start on the rung half-way up. No good! It simply can’t be done. You've got to start anything from the bottom, then you climb and you know how to stick when you've reached the top. Take it from me—there’s no other way to sure and lasting success! “When the show went on the road, I bought a pate of heavy wooden shoes to practice dancing in. he shoes made a lot of noise, which I thought was a fine idea, because I could then keep track of my feet—left and right. “Often while playing different theatres I'd see a stage hand or call-boy doing a few steps. I always offered to pay him to teach them to me. In this way I got some small idea of dancing. “T didn’t have to worry about my voice. It was strong and clear and the manager, knowing -this, (Continued on Page 28)
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sg ee ae ae ee ee Twenty re on old Ishmael’s face and felled him like a RCHIE made straight for Bunch just, as that infuriated man landed a crunching blow He fell between them—master and log. servant faced each other across his prone body. “You dastardly blackguard,”’ cried Archie. ‘I’ve got you at last!”’ “The jig’s up, you fool!’ yelled Bunch. “I've got you! You're a murderer! I can kill you and get a medal for it!” As he spoke his fat little arm flew out like a swollen snake. His writhing fingers seized the oil lamp. With a gasp of horror, Anne moved forward to arrest his grasp, but Bunch gave her a shove that threw her to her knees. The sight of Anne knocked down by the ruffian maddened Archie. He sprang forward just as Bunch brought the lamp crashing toward his head. His outflung arm knocked it aside and it clattered to the floor. Its glass bowl shattered into bits, the burning oil cooling at his feet. Upon his enemy, Archie hurled himself. Heen- countered a tornado of fighting, pounding, thick fists, but mindless of these he beat his way against them forcing himself close and hammering heavy sledge-hammer, ferocious blows against the pudgy face of Bunch. The struggle was short and merciless. At the fifth blow Archie knocked Bunch down. Hesquatted on the gross, fat body and beat his fists against his face until the job was finished. Bunch lay still. This man and his abominable son ate criminals—-Bunch is a super-criminal, a mah with a cunning mind and a fiend.”’ “Anne,” cried Archie. ‘‘Get the bedcovers and throw them over the fire!”’ She limped hurriedly to the bed and did as he requested. Through the gloom lit by the fitful fire she carried the blankets and flung them over the flames, herself falling down upon them and beating out the sparks. It left them in darkness. “There’s a candle on the bureau and matches beside it,” said a rather weak voice. It was Ishmael waking up. Presently the wavering candle-light displayed the chaos of the room. Ishmael, otherwise called Professor McLoud, scrambled to his feet with a~ briskness that was much in contrast with -the feebleness he had affected when in the presence of Bunch. Archie sat on his still senseless captive fearful that he was shamming. Anne stood watching with clasped hands while Clarence hid his head in his pillow and sobbed. “No questions!’ cried the Professor, his voice its old booming self again. ‘‘There is much to be done. I am going to perform a miracle here presently.” He lifted the bedclothes from the charred floor, the fire being completely exstinguished and tossed them over Clarence. From the cupboard he removed another oil lamp which he lighted. He brought a chair for Anne and asked her to sit down. Then he secured a long rope. “My dear Middleton,” he roared, “when I bandaged that boy Clarence I did a good job. I bandaged his legs and arms so tight he couldn't jump out and help his father. He’s safe until the The solution of the great mystery novel by Fulton Oursler | police get here. Now we'll do as much for the / lather. Get up, my dear Middleton, and let me have « look at him,” Wonderingly Anne had looked at Archie when she had heard the Professor call his name. What did it all mean? Why did he call this strange man “Middleton?” Could hope ever be rekindled in her heart ? Meanwhile the Professor trussed up Bunch's fat wrists and ankles with a rope and placed him in a recumbent position half upright against the wall, just as the little fat man opened his eyes. “You shant speak!’’ blazoned the Professor, thrusting a huge towel into Bunch’s. mouth. “You've talked too much already and made me do the listening!’ He paused and looked around to see that all was well, then he folded his arms and retreated to a position near the door where he could address them all as if they were an audience at a play. “I'm going to tell,” he detonated. And Bunch squirmed and wriggled helplessly. ‘I’m going to tell it all, Bunch. You can’t escape your Karma and I'm its instrument. This is the wretched outrance of all your vile plotting against this innocent girl, _ and man.” He looked apologetically from Anne to Archie. “In a very few words I can tell you all,” he said. “For the explanation of all your mysterious troubles is indeed simple. This man and his abominable son are criminals—Bunch is a supercriminal, a man with a cunning mind and a fiend.” He pointed an accus- ing finger at the fallen Bunch. “This man,” he went on, “was my butler in England. At that time I was a distinguished hysician practicing as a high-class beauty and acial specialist. By a terrible accident, in which I was conducting an experiment on one of my patients, and that patient died, Bunch got me into his power and blackmailed me. I fled to this country and I thought I was safe. “But he also came to America and brought with him hisson. His son isa forger and has served a term in Sing Sing. They can’t keep from crime and are always looking for fresh opportunities. Bunch got a place with you, Mr. Middleton, because he knew you were a wealthy man and he meant to rob you. While he was working for you he learned that I was in New York. “Now he knew that I had made a wonderful physical discovery. When I tell you about it it will amaze you as if I had disclosed a secret of magic. Bunch’s scheming mind soon saw a way to use that wonderful discovery for the purposes of crime.’ Iu the knowledge he had gained of your private affairs he suddenly saw a scheme to get all your vast fortune in his hands. The release of his son from prison on parle fitted in perfectly with his extra- ordinarv idea. “He knew that you had willed all your money to Miss Winter. All he had to do was marry his sun to her and put you out of the way and he could ge: that money. That was what he decided to do. T shall not weary you with how he got that snivelling little Clarence close to Miss Winter or how he worke
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Page Twenty Six on her sympathies. What he did to you, Mr. Mid- dleton, is or more pressing importance. “Bunch is an imaginative criminal. He knew the danger of actual murder only too well. Too many of his pals had paid the penalty for him to try it, but he conceived what he considered a perfect crime. He put it into execution. “He knew that by my prodigious discovery it was possible to alter the appearance of a person com- pletely. In addition to the beauty secrets which I biready: knew, by which it is possible to change the color of the eyes and the color of the hair, he also knew that I possessed this tremendous secret which could alter a person's face, its very size and shape. That method, I shall disclose to you in just a moment. “What he decided to do was to change you into an entirely different looking man so that not even your own mother would have known you. Then he would create the suspicion that you had been mur- dered and by altering another corpse which he had obtained from the morgue under a false identification, he made me manufacture an exact duplicate of you in order to complete the illusion. Whether you, in your altere! condition went to the electric chair for your own murder, didn’t in the least concern him. _ “T didn’t understand all this in the beginning, because of the power that he had over me. Because I knew that he could have the avenging law on me if I even whispered what I had accidentally. and inadvertently done. I was a plastic tool in his hand. He came to me and told me what I must do and I agreed to do it. “By drugging your wine, he made you fall unconscious in the taxicab, which had been hovering in your neighborhood and of which his son was the driver. If you had not taken the wine, he would have hit you on the head. You were kept uncon- scious twenty-four hours while | worked over you.— That I did the despicable task well is evidenced by the results. You didn’t know your own self. “Because Bunch is imaginative he insisted upon doing the thing dramatically. Matters were so arranged that you awoke in the taxi exactly twenty- four hours after you had entered it. You continue: on your journey not knowing that anything had happened. You know what followed. ” “The forger, his son, imitated your handwriting and wrote a note to your aunt saying that you were about to be murdered. A blood-stained handker- chief was placed in your pocket. All this was one to carry out their plan to create a suspicion of foul play. It worked well. “T sent a note to you before anything happened telling you the little I knew of what was being planned. It was too late. But not until I read of your arrest did I know what I haddone. Remorse filled my soul then, but what could I do? One thing I determined! You should never go to the electric chair! Before that came I would tell. But would they believe me? The final climax of using that duplicate corpse filled me with horror. I went to see you in the jail, but there my nerve failed me. I was afraid to confess to you. “And then tonight, Middleton, you escaped and came to me. We didn’t know as we sat here talking and arranging our plans how fate would settle matters for us, but matters have worked out well —there remains little to tell, but much to do, for I must perform a miracle.” “What is your. great secret by which you have transformed my face?’’ The professor wiped his brow and looked at his watch. It was near eleven o'clock. “T must first peform a miracle before I tell any- thing,” he said solemnly. ‘‘But if I guarantee by midnight to make you like your old self again—all Ure (es Fad oH tn except the beard, which I cannot replace, will you trust yourself in my hands?” “What will you do?” asked Archie. “I wish you would start right away.” The professor said no more. From another cup- board he wheeled out a small operating table on which he made Archie lie down, then he gave Archie a tablet. “This is my new harmless anesthetic,” he con- fided. “It was what you drank in your wine. Soon I shall give it to the world. Swallow it.”’ Archie did as he was bidden and settled down comfortably on the operating table. For a while he heard the professor keeping up a prattle of con- versation—and then the old man’s voice grew faint and further and indistinguishable and Archie fell into a dreamless unconsciousness. Have You Ever Seen a Man Electrocuted? Probably not. That is a sight few persons ever witness, and only the most hardened individual could actually want to see such a barbarous sight. But, in order to understand the horror of what it means to take human life, you ought to see an execution. Then only would the full import of its significance grip you. MIDNIGHT sent a representative to Sing Sing the other day to witness the execution of Luther Boddy, and to write about just what he saw. That feature will appear in an early number, together with actual! photo- graphs of the death-chair, the death chamber, the entrance of the victim and the strapping of him in the chair. This is, so far as the writer knows, the first real photographs ever taken of the famous little room with the green door and what goes on there. HEN Archie opened his eyes the room was empty save for hirhself and the professor. The old man was quietly encouraging him and smoothing his brow. Presently he allowed Archie to sit up. “Look,” crowed the professor handing him a mirror. Archie stared at his own actual real likeness again and a happy grin spread over his face. He was Archie Middleton in the flesh at last. He grabbed the professor fiercely by the arm, though he still felt a little faint and dizzy. “How did you do it?” he demanded. “T am going to amaze and confound you," boomed the Professor. ‘‘What I say may sound like an impossibility, but your own transformation mst attest the truth of my power. “T have always been a strange man, a fanatic. I have been attracted since my youth to the mysteries of science, religion and philosophy. I kn w the secrets of the cabala, of geomancy, the Hermetic riddles of the Greeks, the obi of the West Indies and the diablerie of all peoples. I know the Moham- medan sorcery of the Algerian Varbouts. |! know the darkest thaumaturgy of medciine and surgery. From a specialist in paidology, I have progressed to theUltima Thule of science and therel found waiting for me great experiments. “T have always contended that half the misery of the world is caused by ugliness. That is why I was proud to be a beauty specialist. “People are born with faces they don’t like and that no one else likes. I fancied I could amass a fortune and do a world of good if I could find a way to change such faces and make them over again. I asked myself what is the real secret of beauty. Is it skin deep? Does it not lie deeper than skin or flesh? It does, sir! Beauty is tone deep. Our entire appearance is primarily due to our bones. “There I had it. If I could only find a way to alter the bones. To make them plastic and reshape them. And then after a long time T remembered a schoolroom experiment in physics. Take a hen’'s egg and soak it in vinegar. What happens? You know—the shell comes soft again—so soft that vou can push the egg through the narrow neck of a bottle and after you have removed the vinegar the shell hardens again and you can’t get it out without breaking the glass. “If I could only do to bones what I could do to the eggshell think what alterations I could effect in a human face. There was the answer to one of the greatest riddles of humanity. “T must change the bones. “T must soften them, anneal them, knead them like wax or dough in my hands, make them grizzle again in their softened plastic condition. I could reshape them as I pleased. Make a crooked nose shapely, a low forehead high, a cheek bone less prominent, a round face less rotund—take out a whole section and mend the face without it if I wished, and then I must harden the bones after- wards and make their new shape permanent. It was only a matter of experimenting once I had the theory. Calsium, I knew was what made bones hard. I merely learned to decalsify the bones. That is all there is to my great secret. By injecting into human bones a certain chemical formula, I can neutralize all the calcium salts for a time and restore them to a grizzle form which makes them pliable. “But I didn’t stop there. -I made a pigment for coloring the eye and another for rubbing into the scalp so that not only was.the grown hair dead, but the root itself absorbed the color matter. It will make the effect last for weeks. When I dpened my beauty parlor there would be everything ready. “Now you know. | have told you all, I am no longer afraid of Bunch. In making me do these things, he has put himself in my power as I was once in his. This has been a glorious climax for his downfall. I am free at last. Free to undo the wrong I have done. Free from hellish oppression. Free from this bandit, this rowdy, this gangster, this blackleg murderer!’ He-shook ‘his fist at the door. “Where is Bunch and his son?” asked Archie. “T let them go,’ said the old man solemnly. They have agreed to flee this country tonight and at this moment they are on their way to Canada. We will never hear from them again.” “But where is Anne?”’ The professor looked at him and smiled like a lunatic. “IT shall show you a second miracle,”’ he said. “Of all men in the world I, with a terrible secret that has brought you so much sorrow, alone could have brought you this happiness.” Archie turned to the door-and looked and there stood Anne. She was erect, straight and alive and radiant with the happiest smile in the world, and the effulgence of that glad smile, the lambent light of happiness in her glorious eyes told Archie much. She moved slowly toward him, gracefully, eagerly, with all the freedom that had been hers when she was a little girl. Anne no longer a cripple! Anne of the broken hip healed! Archie caught Anne to his heart. He knew now that the barrier between them was broken down, that out of the shadows they were come together in- to the light, and he held her close to him praising his God. (THE END)
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Page Fwenty Seven. The Life Story of Veronica WILL not either my feclings when our eyes met nor the shock which attempt to describe came to me immediately after. I shall simply tell the blasting and astounding truth. Eddie looked at me and smiled. “Tt is really you,’ he said. ‘‘I waited for you.” “T followed you half way around the world,” I told him. z “T am sorry you went to all that trouble,’ he said. “T can’t talk now because I am still very weak, but I am on my way to recovery and will some day be able to go back to the trapeze, but I felt I must see you right away. I couldn’t wait. I wanted to ask your forgiveness. I can never be happy unless I have your forgiveness. You see, Veronica, that I was not really angry with you because: you had deceived me—although that did seem to justify me to myself. The fact is, 1 guess that I never was good enough for you. I tried to be on the level with you—but the fact is that I only thought I wanted to marry and settle down. It was the wanderlust; a desire for adventure that sent me to the war, and after I got over in France I was married to a girl in Normandy just before we got to the front lines. Can you forgive me?” * * * * * ey. say that all of us have one story to tell. I have told mine and yet I have not told it all. When I heard that confession from Eddie’s lips, as he lay weak and pallid on his cot in the hospital, I thought that I had come to the end of all things. What was there left in life for me? The one weak- ness of my life had seemed to be that I was a butter- fly with only the love for music, dancing and color to make my character beautiful. Now, when I had turned right about face and had devoted myself to an ideal conception of love, I was suddenly yanked back to earth by the brashest and cruelest of realities. The following days and weeks are bitter memories, but I got over them. I lived through them and came out of them with ambition restirred and renewed. One evening I was taking a walk down. beautiful Broadway with its millions of blinking golden lights, its laughing, chattering crowds, its snorting, honking motors, its bursts of music coming to me through the open doors of the cabarets. All of a sudden my - night after night, 1 have found great favor. We hope you have en- the Veronica’s picturesque joyed story of career. Another grip- ping life soon begin in MIDNIGHT story will tragedy seemed to grow less important. A furtive yearning for the old life and the old thrill and the old happiness came back to me. On the corner of Broadway and Forty-third I ran into a man who more than once made overtures to me to join his company. He was Billy Arnold, now proprietor of the show of the Moulin Rouge. His heartiness of greeting left me no doubt as to how glad he was to see me. “Are you working, Veronica?’ he asked me. And when I told him ‘‘No,’’ he assured me there was a place waiting for me in a new troupe which he was organizing. Next day I began rehearsals. That was how I came to the Moulin Rouge. There fame has found me. In the eyes of the people who frequent its tables and its dance floor They watch me do my toe dancing and they applaud thunderously. They see me with my clown partner in our whirls and neck spins and they gasp with astonishment. They behold me leaping on the v. ire and tremble for my safety. When they call m2 to their tables they praise my rosy cheeks and sparkliiz eyes and tell me I have the fatal gift of beauty. Married men and single men would lure me with beguiling proposals. Mysterious gifts of roses and jewels come to me. People tell me that I have only begun,—that a marvellous career is before me. In this life | am happier than I ever hoped to be. I prance about the floor throwing cheery smiles and blithe glances to thé tired people who have sought relief from the sordid cares of everyday life in our beautiful Moulin Rouge. As airy and jaunty as a real butterfly, I flit among them answering their breezy greetings with sportive badinage. The mirth and the glee and the gaiety fills a want which my soul craves. I am most completely myself when I am leading these frolicsome show girls in a lilting dance among the laughing parties at the tables. And those boys who think they are ‘‘seeing life,” who are having their fling and painting old New York red again, I love them all. Though now and then someone who doesn’t understand, covers me with infamy in a glance, betrays and seduces me with a meaning smile, though I can read all the ugly passion in their hearts, I am not frightened nor do I hate them. I am free! Queen of New Yorks Moulin Rouge hat is the one glorious fact of this kind of life. I can be as bad or as good as I care to! The shackles of convention cannot bind my feet! If I were as holy as the virgin priestess of a Greek temple—who would believe me? If I told my beads between every dance and made the stations of the cross between every performance, the people who do not know our lives would be convinced that we were a depraved and hopeless lot. That conviction, which nothing can upset’ or destory, is what makes us free. We don’t have to mind our p’s and q’s. We are free to be ourselves, and there is a strange morality in that. Human beings, I am convinced, are little children after all. They yearn for the forbidden thing! All real full-blooded people are rebels. They abominate conventions because they are conventions. When the barriers are lifted, when one is responsible to no one but herself, the stadard of living then becomes as high as the individual conception of decency. I have seen many a girl from some church com- munity in the middle west come into our place and look at me as if I were a creature from some other world—a world upon which she might look with curiosity, but which she regarded as immoral and degrading. But I am free to state my belief that behind the scenes of a cabaret, there is at least more kindness, more genuine human feeling, a greater regard for the rights of ochers, and a higher standard of manhood and womanhood than in most of our small town sewing circles, Bible classes and choirs. Sometimes I see thoughtful men with good and serious faces sitting at our tables. They look at me curiously as if wondering what manner of creature | am. Well, I have tried to show myself in my true colors. But I do resent the implication that I, and the girls who dance with me night after night, have no real place in the work of the world. We have a good and noble work to do, we coryphees and corybants of the Great White Way. In a humbler station, in a lesser degree, perhaps, but surely we are doing the same great service for the hearts of humanity that it is the great privilege of a Kreisler, a Mary Garden, a Jeritza to accomplish. Ours isa motley throng. All sorts of conditions of men and women come into the Moulin Rouge to eat the good dinner that is served there and to see our Society Circus. Rich men and poor ones, honest men and thieves, bright men and dumb-bells sit side by side. The great majority of them couldn’t understand or appreciate Kreisler or Garden or Jeritza, but that doesn’t mean that they have not the yearning for rhythm, melody and dance, or the young beauty of women. In the measure which they can receive it, we give it to them. This is our justification for our life and our occupation. The aesthete who quivers and trembles with delight as he beholds Pavlowa in the Snow Flakes Ballet or in Copellia, might call me crude, but it is not for him that I dance and trip across the wire. I dance and laugh for the man who cannot appreciate Pavlowa, but who has rhythm in his soul. I bring to tired and weary hearts cheerfulness, liveliness and festivity. I am a toy, a plaything, a bauble of the moment, a doll to amuse them, My glances and my smiles and the tripping lightness of my dance divert them and enliven them, As, in my fancy, gauzy gowns, I disport about the floor they watch my knees and shoulders hungrily. Shall I be insulted at that, or shall I pity thern—pitv them for the drab existence which makcs such second-hand thrills enjoyable?
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Page Fwenty ight N I have seen life in many of its most unusual phases, from the wanton revel of private parties in the cabaret to the carouse and jollification of stag affairs. Festivity, merrymaking and the jamboree! These are the daily dccupations of Veronica. There is no weariness, no ldathing, no disgust, after all the years I have been in the cabaret. It has never palled on me. I go today with something of the fervor of the Nautch girls of the later Hindoo pagodas. It may surprise you, who read what I have tosay, that I have some smattering of an education in spite of the peculiar history of my career, in which school Seles so unimportaht a part. The fact is that I ave met some wonderful people, men and women of the world, who have taken an interest in me, and the education which I have came from my intimacy with them. They have been able to give me a new vision of life and to teach me of the worth-whileness of the better things. To those who think that a Raphael picture and a Brahms symphony are the heights of beauty and that nothing else matters ey much, my attitude may be misunderstood, but I do defend the cabaret as an institution and the girls who are its chief asset. We bring gladness into jaded hearts. Many a minister cannot say as much. I have had several gentlemen inquire about the state of my soul. None of them ever left me fecling exhilirated. They seemed to think it was the business of religion to make people alte Per- haps that conception of religion is pro ether it is or is not doesn’t concern me. y business in the world is to make people happier than I am my- self. Vive la bagatelle! And now, before I slip back from your company and bid you farewell, let me confess just one more thing. Tavs managed to forget Eddie, although the love I had for him was a very real and earnest thing. It added something to my character which I shall never lose. But now I do not love him. I have looked into the eyes of another man—a man who haunts our cafe night after night, week in and week out, sitting at a favorite table where he can watch me most advantageously. He has never spoken to me. He has never asked that I come to his table, and yet his eyes linger on me and there is a message of affection in his glances. I havea feeling that soon he will address me. I want him to. For the last confession of Veronica is that again she has fallen in love—with a stranger! And some- thing in my heart is whispering that this time it is a case of true love and real martiage after all. THE END. Value of a Stolen Kiss (Continued from Page 21) thrust forth into ‘the public print in the progress of a divorce suit, in which the woman co-respondent had yearned: ‘I am going to be perfectly useless until I am in your arms again and your dear lips are kissing me into heaven.”” And, in another missive: “I am so restless and hungry for your kisses. -1 really shouldn't be, should I, dear, because you kissed me to death just twenty-four hours ago.”’ What use to try to be exact and reasonable about kisses, when a woman will say she was kissed to death, yet in the same moment hold forth her lips for more? It would seem to prosaic, matter-of-fact persons, rsons unafflicted with the poetic instinct that this idea of placing a value upon kisses from male lips to female as well as vice versa might offer a way out of the difficulty. In fact one rather hard-boiled citizen who was sued in a vast amount for a great number of stolen kisses, took the court’s and the plaintiff's joint breath away by offering generously to give them all back. ut the illogical lady and the hard-hearted judge scorned -his kind offer. We must simply abandon the hope that people will ever be logical, reasonable, legalistic, mathe- matical or anything else that savors of calculation in the matter of kisses. Referring to the citurch folks again, not so many years ago, and doubtless at present in many rural communities, good church folk who sternly forbid dancing, will allow and even promote kissing games. Here is ecstasy unlimited, infinite, for the careful devotee. With benefit of clergy he may drink his fill of the rosy lips of his pit iolintesrshipyets: and the clergyman will only amule ‘And T, too, smile, as I think of a night long ago— and far away. We belonged to one of those ultra anti-dancing churches and, so far as my own pastor was concerned, anti-kissing churches. But one night the Presiding Elder, and his daughter were on hand, entertained at the home of a prosperous farmer, who also had a daughter. My cousin and I had come for the evening, and with us a bewitch- ingly fair maid from a neighboring farmhouse. e had kissing games—and the Presiding Elder himself was master of ceremonies. Our preacher was there, but since the Presiding Elder was grant- ing absolution he did not object. But the kisses—Clap-In-Clap-Out: Post Office, Copenhagen- Oh, the delights of it! And all under the sanction «/ the church. Perhaps if there was any logic in the elder’s mind it was that it was a strictly family party—his daughter, and a: lot of nieces, cousins, and the like. But it was a nice party, and my cousin and | were glad we went to that church. Yet observe the curious sequel. We rode home with two of the girls. That is, some of the older guests rode on the front seat of the “spring wagon” and two of the girls, my cousin, and I sat down in the back. Now by what possible logic could we have been expected to know that kissing time was over? We did not know it, and we acted in accordance with our lack of knowledge. Four long, delicious miles of kissing. But in some way or other that leaked our—and were we scolded ?—Oh Boy! It was by the narrowest imaginable margin that we both escaped a spanking. Why? Who had we been stealing the kisses from? Not the girls. They were willing. Not from the presiding elder? We thought he had given permis- sion. I fear we are no nearer a solution of our problem than when we n. How much is a kiss worth? And the inevitable, though not irreverent answer must be—since not the courts, nor the clergy, nor the ladies themselves know—the answer to the question, How Much Is a Kiss Worth? must be— It depends on the kiss—and the kisser. Geo. M. Cohan and Fanny Brice (Continued from Page 24) would sometimes let me sing from different parts of the house. I sang from a box! from the orchestra! or the gallery, in those days—any old place but from the stage. It seemed that the management was willing to do almost anything to keep me out of the glare of the footlights! “But you know how it is-—‘genius will burn’ and all that!””, Fanny was poking fun at herself. “During my tour with that show we would hold a Chorus Girls’ Competiton in nearly every town and I always got first prize. This: gave me the oppor- tunity to become understudy to the soubrette. “Now this little lady didn’t care for me at all. She knew I had my eye on her part and realized that if I got a chance I might walk away with it. © Everyone in the show knew that, including her husband, the stage manager. He and ‘said sou- brette’ made up their minds that I should never get the chance. And I thought I never would. She was so darn healthy! “But—one day an abscess appeared on her neck. I am ashamed now to admit that I looked at it hopefully. ‘Now’s my chance’ J thought. “Did she hand over her part to me? She did not! Each day I eagerly watched that abscess. No rare specimen ever receiyed the attention I gave that abscess! I saw it grow bigger and bigger thinking that surely by the next night I'd have to go on in pene ee ee ee ———— — Ty her place. But no! When it got large enough to be seen from out front she tied a ribbon around hér neck and covered the abscess with a big pink bow! One evening it did break while she was on doing a dance. She rushed into the wings, where I was standing in breathless expectation, and, for the second time, I was pushed onto the stage! I looked around me. The music started up. I begah to dance! My but wasn’t I excited! I dariced so hard and so fast that the orchestra could scarcely keep up with me. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and when I finished the number and rar off-stage, it still stuck there. “There was wild applause. The audience was kind to me. They knew I was the understudy as the soubrette had done the first two numbers. I got ten encores. Many more than she had ever gotten. From that night her part was given to me and she was put in the chorus. I suppose I ought to be ashamed to tell how glad I was. But what's the use? The truth’s the truth and you can’t help it!’ Again Fanny's inimitable shrug and the upturned palms. “The next season a new management was puttin out a Burlesque called ‘The College Girls.” thought that was the place for me—right with the college girls. It had such a classy sound! “Again I was rating myself high! “TI went to see the manager and told him I had been the lead in the last show. He asked me if I did specialties. I didn’t know what he meant, but I looked wise and nodded my head. Fortunately he didn’t look me up. “T was taken into the compathy and everything went fine. I was having it too easy. One Saturday the manager came back stage and said, ‘We’re going to havea benefit down at Arverne tomorrow. Every- body bring a costume and be prepared to do a specialty!’ “Again I thought I was finished! No specialty! “T ran over to Irving Berlin’s Music Store for a new song. “What do you want?’ said they. “I said, ‘Oh, any old thing—something easy to learn!’ “So they gave me a Jewish comedy song. Had it béen an Irish song I might today be an Irish com- edienne.” Fanny winked and gave her nose a dab of powder. “T took the music and started home. My mother ironed a white sailor suit for me. It was stiffly starched and stuck out like a balloon. There were yards of material in that skirt. The blouse had a big anchor on the shield and a star on the sleeve. I thought I looked just grand. “T hadn't any training in how to ‘put over’ a Jewish comedy number, but I pictured just how some of the old-fashioned Yiddish people i knew would act out the words of the song. I can always do that T mean I can always feel just how types would clo a thing—it doesn’t have to be Yiddish. I can put myself in the place of another person and ‘get’ the exact atmosphere or whatever it is—then I act it out. I've always longed to do a dramatic part. I know I could—but when I've felt tempted to give up comedy, I always say to myself, ‘No, Fanny, you haven’t the edu¢ation for drama and you want to do it right—3o I always come back to the line I'm sure of. That’s another important requisite for success. You've got to stick! “That's why people so often fail even when the have talent. Frey haven't a balance-wheel. } guess you'd call it common sense or intelligence. Success is fifty per cent. intelligence, forty per cent. work and only about ten per cent. talent. “T never stop working. I plan at least ten years ahead and I don’t let my imagination run‘away with me either. I am now just where I knew I’d be ten years ago. I knew I couldn’t accomplish more—and I made up my mind that I wouldn’t do less. It’s turned out just as I knew it would. And I know just where I'll be ten years from now. I’m hot telling it, because I think you kill your plans by telling them.” Fanny looked appealingly at me for compre- hending agreement. I supplied it. So she went:on. “Over at Arverne that night my song was a big hit. Everyone seemed to like it and again I won the contest. 4 “At the end of that season the show played a week in New York. Mr. Ziegfeld saw me in it ahd made arrangements for me to appear under his management. This was in 1910. I am still with him and this fall I’m going to be starred in a new musical show by Rida Johnson Young. 3 No costume!
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i /08/O0H 7 mu Ra ems eaidentee My Greatest Thrill (Continued from Page 22) PAST MIDNIGHT S THE clock in the courthouse, a block away, struck the twelfth time, I began to doze. Sud- lenly | sat up in bed in the hotel room with a start. ¢ knob on the door of my room had been turned, ever so slightly but sufficient to recall me to my senses, I recalled J had failed to turn the key in the lock. The door swung open. In the light of the hallway stood a woman, clad only in a flimsy night gown. I rubbed my eyes in amazement, as the woman pushed the door wide open and stepped quietly in the room. f medium height, not inclined to be slim, with her hair hanging loosely about her shoulders, I coyld see she was young. And she was beautiful. y first thought, that she was a sleepwalker, was dispelled when she turned and closed the door a the inside, I heard the key turn in the lock. thought for a moment and decided to get from Mig bed, but was halted by the feeling of the presence of someone near. I heard a board in the floor give slightly under her weight. A soft small hand tquched my forehead. Another touched the side of my head. They crept slowly down the side of my face to my cheeks, silently, softly, carefully. My brain literally whirled. Was I awake? here came a loud knock on the door. A voice called; ‘Open your door!” Whether I should open the door, tell the truth, or remain quiet and allow the knocker to tire, was the problem I faced. I was not left to decide. I could feel the woman leave my presence. I heard her move across the room. perplexed brain was given another jolt, as the lights of the room were turned on. Before me, at the switch, stood the most beautiful person I had ever looked upon. The gown she had worn lay a few feet away. Before I could concentrate my thoughts, the woman reached the door, turned the key in the lock, and turned the knob, throwing the door wide open. In the hallway, looking into the room, was Higgins the clerk, Smith the house detective, and a stranger. “There’s my wife,” remarked the latter. If his voice carried an implication of a threat, I cquld not recognize it. Before the group of men, and as a barrier between, stood the woman. Her husband advanced, He placed a robe about her: shoulders, and led her from the room. As the two rv omipes Smith, the detective remarked to me: “No need to worry, old man. Her husband is taking her to an asylum for the insane. They had to stop here between trains.” T rolled into bed. I slept. DOT Pd ce THE AMATEUR Or large country home was deserted, even the servants had left, as the rumor of night maraud- ers and thieves had spread about. My parents, leaving, had warned me to teturn to the city. I scorned and laughed at them. Just the same my sister placed 4 loaded revolver on the small table next to my bed, Thus, one dreary evening I stayed at home reading a cheap detective story which I had found in the servants’ quarters. All evening I heard queer noises but I continued until going to bed at 12 o'clock. Scarcely had I fallen asleep when horrible dreams overtook me. I was fighting hard with a bear. I fell. He pounced on me, shaking me, his wild eyes staring at me. I awakened. ea two stary eyes were close in front of me, also the cold muzzle of an automatic. “Shut up or I'll shoot.” I perspired—scared stiff from hot to cold, then collected myself. My hand dropped to the side, hitting the electric button and suddenly lighting the room. The thief, a true amateur, dropped his gun more frightened than myself. I grasped my revolver, He dropped his mask, begging, much to my surprise, : 1 exclaimed: “Buddy!” My old friend had turned desperate from lack of sourishment and walting for the bonus and this was “ig pest job. I got my scare, yes, but my friend got 2 105 with my father, and still we keep the secret. Neil Clark. hat ph eemeceenere. ae 2 —— _._ Page Twenty Mine __ How I Entertained My Sweetheart (Continued from Page 6) Smoke’s sophisticated ‘vamping’’ ways. I re- membered when I tried out even more potent wiles on John. It was on the occasion when John and I were alone together in the studio-apartment for the first time, on the day he arrived. “Er—er, do you have men up here alone?” he had asked. : I had nodded exultantly. Then I dragged him over to the davenport and buried him among the cushions—pulling a yellow cord that flooded the room in a soft amber glow. DuBarry, herself, would have sighed over the effect of careless seduction I achieved. So I gave good old John his first taste of a New York petting party, de luxe brand! How embarassed he was! And how he fought shy of that sleeveless orchid-colored evening gown of mine that just couldn't help drape itself on his broad chest. : i “Oh darling,’ he had breathed, his lipe against mine, ‘you musn’t—you mustn't.” d then. I knew that no small-town vamp had been corrupting my John and that he was the same pure knight of the cherry-blossom lane. J] was ashamed—but John drew me closer into his arms and rained on my lips hot kisses. At last, he pushed me from him. I sat back laughing at him, my eyes clinging to his teasingly. Then I coolly lit a cigarette and blew rings at him. na rage, he got to his feet and paced the floor like a caged lion. Finally he regarded me with a stricken look. - $ “Susan Godfrey!’ he exploded. “My God— what would your father say if he could see you now! What would all the folks home think—puffing on that vile thing! It’s disgraceful. Is this what New York does to young girls?” He snatched the cigarette from my lips—my best Russian brand, too—and threw it out of the window with a gesture of scorn. : “Oh, Susan girl,” he cried, bending over me, ‘‘come home with me—come home, and we'll be married. And just then the telephone tinkled. ; “That you, Herb?” I purred into the receiver. “Huh-huh. Dear, then, you silly thing—no, no, not tonight—my out-of town-friend, you know. Sh-h! Central's listening.” I gave a clear, silvery laugh— and hung up. John orbs icokinn at me with a hurt look. ‘Who's Herb?”’ he asked prufy. “Oh, Herbert Rawlison?”’ I said carelessly. “Just a friend of mine.’ Why did I take such a keen delight in teasing this big, overgrown boy! “Don’t like his name,” he returned shortly. “Never asked you to,” was my saucy reply. “Only you must be as nice as possible to him tomor- row night. He’s going to take you and Smoke and me on a most bee-u-tiful party. Promise?’ And I perched myself on his knee, tweaking his ear and planting a kiss on the part in his hair. * * * * * aus Hula Hula lady had gone, and the floor was filling with dancers again. My thoughts swirled on, eddying and twisting in formless shapes like the inane, foolish couples out there in each other’s arms. Life with John—supposing I became his wife? Well, we would probably start out with a little white house and a stuffy little “‘parlor.’’ But we would eat and breathe and have our being in the kitchen, with its rust’ pea and its tin sink. How I knew it! Washing dis es... . babies—twins, probably, the first year; Then the Cattle Fair in the fall with John’s prize Holstein slicked and curried to the last hair. There would be Ladies’ Aid meetings in my “parlor” every Friday afternoon, wherein we ladies would exchange village gossip—"‘Grace So-and-So is going out with Joseph So-and-So, for they sat in the same pew last Sunday and he calls on her twice regular every week. Parson Simmons can press his frockcoat for another weddin’!""—as we sewed garments for the suffering heathen, I remembered the barn-raising in our town the summer before I left home, the season’s gala event. Farmer Olmstead, who lived on the Drum Hill Road, invited my father to be master of ceremonies on that hot July day. Old Olmstead was considered the richest man in the county and what a feather it was in Father’s cap that he was known the country- side around as open aspirant for my heart and hand . . . . That ginger cake and sweet cider— how fragrant and cool it tasted in the noonday heat, unwrapped from the damp towels = Later, my elderly suitor was hot with rage when John and I wandered off together into the shade of an oak tree. Served him right, I had thought— silly old fool! * * * * * “joes has gone home. __ Jt is a rainy afternoon, and I have not yet written that letter that is to make him “the happiest man in the world."’ Oh, he is pretty sure of me! Comes Rawlison's voice over the phone pleading with me to tour the Park in a hansom. Last remaining relics of a Victorian era, hansom cabs now exist merely for the traffic of lovers upand down the Avenue and through Central Park. On a misty day, a fine light rain preferable, the freight of these caravanserai look out on the shining asphalt of Fifth Avenue through a haze of romance. Rawlison could not have selected a better setting to pursue his suit further! I tore off my smock, threw down my brushes, glad of-any excuse at all to lay off work for the afternoon. Herbert began by taking my hand in his in the masterful way he has. The cabby had just steered out of the traffic that whirls giddily around the Plaza and was making for the dripping green expanse of the Park, “Thinking seriously of marrying that out of town friend of yours?” he asked. ‘‘Take it from me— much better give him his walking papers, and let me put the gold band on Ua dl dent white finger.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it lingeringly. “Oh, I don’t know,” I remarked. ‘John is the best ever—not that I don’t adore you, Herb dear!” “Tut! I’m pretty wise to your feelings for me. But I love you, Sue. Think you are the gameiest little scout that ever came out of Hicksville. In another year, I'll clear up a fine bonus down on the Street. We could figure on a nice little place out in Pelham or somewhere—and a car. “You can't go back, Sue—”’ alas, I was beginning to realize that almost foo well. ‘Why, girl, give up the setting you have built around yourself here? It would be too damn much to ask of any woman! I won't let you. I love you—I love you.” He persia me up in his arms and pressed back my ead in a long kiss. I stirred, a lump rising in my throat. Oh, was ever a girl treated to such an emotional mix-up! I loved John—but I liked Herbert im- mensely. Could I don the gingham apron and sunbonnet, could I wave good-bye to moleskin wraps and the gowns from Madame Frances? Suppose I fled to the arms of neither man, but just clung to my drawing-board—my skill as an artist would increase as each year went by and I might reasonably look tsa to some big-salaried position, and even ame, And I let Rawlison kiss me again. * * * * * ND now I must begin the letter to John. Itis the most important turning point in my life. Upon the words I shall now pen hangs Destiny as by a thread. All I have written so far is: “Dear John—” Back numbers of MID- NIGHT may be had from the publishers at 10 cents a copy. — MIDNIGHT Publishing Co.,.119. West 40th Street, New York i a ET A ae ee.
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“Page Thirty Daughter of a Murderer (Continued from Page 18) and clothe my two little sisters whom I still kept at school. The rent was the smallest item on the bill. I paid ten dollars a month for one room in which we slept and ate and did our washing and ironing. soon saw that it was impossible for me to make both ends meet on this stipend. It couldn’t be done regardless of ‘how hard I tried to doit. Poverty was gnawing at the vitals of my kid sisters and myself, there were but two ways out, either I must become a thief or a woman of the streets. I chose the former. I had to do it, there was no alternative. It was a case of steal or go hungry and necessity knows no law! (To be continued) Seance with Jazzy Spooks (Continued from Page 5) came out of that dark room contained upon its sur- face a face that did not belong there, a face that had not been visible to our naked eyes, the staring, bearded, unmistakable countenance of the old Columbia professor who gave his life to a pursuit of phantoms and who died unsatisfied,—the face of the man who proclaimed himself through that rapping table; the face of James H. Hyslop! And there you have it. What is the solution of such a mystery? When we showed that picture to Dr Walter Franklin Prince, the principal officer of the American Society for Psychic Research, Dr. Prince identified it as Hyslop’s face. No man in the world is more familiar with fraud as practiced in spirit photography thanhe. All the old tricks he has been able to detect. But here is one which he cannot explain. “Tf,’”’ said he, ‘‘this is a fraud, then it is a most excellent, a most adroit fraud. None of the old tricks have been employed here and if it is a real spirit picture, it is the kind of a picture that I should think a spirit would really make.” When we hold our next meeting Dr. Prince will be there. So interested is he in our proceedings that he wants to observe the work. Perhaps he shall be able to find the one clue that has hitherto escaped us all. But in this connection, let me point out that the one great test which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declares is the true touchstone to truth in such manifestations is here apparently met. In one of his letters to me, Sir Arthur said, “Tt is when you get pictures of the dead which look like them, but of which no such picture actually exists in the world that you have a genuine spirit picture.”’ So far as we have been able to find, no such picture of Hyslop as we found on this plate has ever been known to exist. I am an old hand at this game. fraudulent mediums behind the bars. attended hundreds of seances. If you ask me what I think of this picture, I say to you that I am certain it is a fraud. his is a serious accusation. It seems to imply that someone has a guilty knowledge. I am not willing to admit that. It is the most amazing spirit potas mystery of which I have ever heard, but I erewith announce that I shall make it my business to find out the truth of this matter and. within six months I shall either expose the trick or become a convert to genuine spirit photography. I have put I: have Naughtiest Girl in America (Continued from Page 20) “No, Margie,” the parson murmured. “I suppose not.” “And, oh, there was a fight once, over on Second Avenue. In a restaurant. That was an old guy. He was married, too, but he went crazy. And this night I had just happened to go out with a friend, a young electrician. He meant nothing to me. We were just talking things over. But-the old fellow saw me go in-with ‘him, and he got three or four strong men together, and they sailed in and beat my fend. something terrible. They half killed him. And the old man slapped my face. I ran upstairs ait down the back way and hopped into a taxi. They went up to the hotel where they thought I was staying and tried to smash down my door. I had just left the hotel that day, and they didn’t know it. My old luck was with me. They'd have killed me, I guess—”’ The parson twitched again. “Why should anyone want to kill you, Margie, a good girl like you!” h “Oh-ho!’’ I thought to myself. “Is this our young friend who thought he had found the wickedest girl in the United States!” “That’s right,” laughed Margie. ‘‘Why should they? But men are funny. You can never tell what they’re going to do, can you?” “No,”’ said the parson thoughtfully. ‘‘That’s right. You can’t.” “But I kept away from him,’’ Margie continued. “And finally he gave up and let me alone.” ] WANTED the young minister to know the worst. “That shimmying, Margie, how did you come to do that?” Her laugh rang out clear and merry ‘“Why, t just do that because the people like it. I was one of the first shimmiers.” I expected my parson to put in a little preaching here, but he was silent, sipping his coffee, deep in thought. “What are your favorite songs?” I asked, to keep the narrative afloat. “Why, I guess ‘Granny’ is the one I like best.”’ “Oh, ho! again,” thought I. ‘‘So this is our wicked little girl, preferring ‘Granny’ above all the songs she sings!’’ “Then I like ‘Old Pal,’”’ she went on. “And then there’s a song a fellow I was engaged to once, out in Chicago, Roger Graham, wrote me. It’s got my picture on, and all. That’s called ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody.’ ”’ The parson looked up nervously, but Margie did not notice. “That’s a nice one, too,”’ she mused. “‘Margie,”’ said the parson suddenly, ‘‘may I take you home?” I’ve neglected to mention that the latter part of Margie’s story was narrated in a restaurant the next night, after the show. he meal and the story were done. It was midnight. Margie looked at him sharply. “No, I’m afraid not. I promised my brother to meet him here at twelve o'clock. He'll be along any minute.” The parson was not nervous now. Nor was he blushing. The pallor that had spread over his cheeks when Margie had been tormenting him over the footlights of the Olympic stage was on his face again. a suppose we must say good night, then, Margie,”’ he said. ‘‘But I have a small favor to ask, when we get out in the hall. You'll at least come as far as the door with us, won't you.” “Sure thing,’”’ said Margie cheerily. : And, as we stood in the dimness of the hallway— “What can I do for you?” “T'd like to kiss your hand,” he said, bravely, not minding me. Margie’s low, luscious laughter sifted through the dingy hall. “Oh, I’m not quite so stingy as all that,’’ she rippled. ‘‘Wouldn’t you rather have this—’’ nd she kissed him on lips that were white and tremulous as they met hers. I wonder—was it? No. There’s no use wondering what it was. It was not altogether unlike worship. I am quite sure that in it there was no trace of condemnation. : He left us abruptly, and I have not seen him siz72. But Margie, I am glad to say, I still see frequently. In fact it was only this afternoon that I saw her last, laughing still, standing-beside the water cooler, back stage in Minski’s National Winter Garden, pinning some fancy stuff around her wrists, for her next number, some filmy ends of drapery that went from her spangled bodice to ankles and arms. French Heels and Bootlegs (Continued from Page 13) quarrel with Gussie Wilson, his assistant, and struck her. When the police were summoned. she led them to where a still was in operation in the basement, and both were arrested. Mrs. Frances Romano was arrested five times for selling liquor, which she kept hidden beneath vege- tables on her stand in Amsterdam Avenue, New York City. In two instances she was convicted and fined $500. Domenic Albana ten years old, and his brother, SS EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEI ood James, twelve, of Belleville, N. J., walked into the police station at Nutley, and told the officers that they had been locked out of their home by their mother. The police went to the place, forced the door, 2nd found Mrs. Albana in one room, a man in another, and in a third a fifty-gallon still, twelve bottles of home-made whiskey and 100 gallons of alcohol. They arrested the man and the woman, and confiscated two revolvers, a shotgun and a magazine rifle. Mrs. Edith Stevens Hirsh, nineteen years old, pretty and stylish, who deserted her husband that she might become the companion of Antonio Cassese, a wealthy bootlegger, was tried in the United States District Court, in Brooklyn, charged with conspiracy to bring liquor into this country from the Bahama Islands. Cassese and the girl were arrested in a raid on his steam yacht ‘‘Ripple,”’ which was used as a rum runner, he man jumped his bail, and still is a fugitive from justice. he girl admitted acting as a checker on part of the liquor brought on board the yacht, but stated that she did not know what the bags contained. A jury of men took little time in acquitting her, and the Court later stated that, though the woman should have been declared guilty, he could not blame the jury for its action, as the principal and his male aids had escaped. The women bootleggers have found the real silver lining to the Volstead cloud. To them it has brought prosperity, money, furs, jewels and speedy motor-cars, the like of which they never dreamed of ossessing in the net distant past. They are strong or a,continuance of the Eighteenth Amendment as it stands. To permit the sale of light wines and beers surely would be a case of killing the goose which is laying the golden eggs for them. Sold to the Devil (Continued from Page 10) if he went down before the dinner hour, he descended to the main floor a full quarter hour before the time for dinner. He went down the great, main stairway into the hall, and was hesitating over which way to turn, when he heard the sound of music and went toward ate Someone was playing the piano, and playing it exceptionally well. He hoped it was Beri for nothing would have given him more pleasure than to see her again; and -he was sure he could find an excuse for intruding onher. . When he reached the door of the room from which the sound of music came, he stood still. The performer was a woman, indeed, but she was not the daughter but the wife of the financier. He was so disappointed that he started back and would have gone away if Mrs. Walters had not called out, though without turning her head, ‘‘Come in, Mr. Street.” He saw then that there was a.large mirror in front of her. ‘‘Thank you!" he said, and entered the room. She stopped playing and turned her head. ‘‘Per- haps you don’t care for music.” “Tam very fond of it,”’ he assured her; ‘‘especially of Mozart.’’ fo she exclaimed, ‘‘you are a musician, your- self.” “After a fashion. Won't you go on playing?” “Some other time. Just now I’d rather talk to you. Please sit down.’”’ She rose and went to a chair, smiling at him in a very friendly way. “I have an idea you sing.’”’ “A little,’’ he answered, seating himself near her. “Later, you'll sing for me,’’ she asserted in, her assured way. ‘‘Baritone, I suppose?’’ “Yes.” “T thought so from your speakin: a baritone. How long have you Walters?” “About two weeks.” “Quite long enough to hate him,”’ she said calmly. “Oh, Mrs. Walters!’’ he murmured deprecatingly. She smiled in a way that made Street think of sunlight flashing across an icy surface. She had a cold, flawless sort of beauty, not only of face but of form; the Jatter being more than indicated by a dinner gown that would have seemed daring on an ordinary woman. “You needn’t commit yourself, Mr. Street,’ shé said coolly, “‘but I know a fighting jaw and fighting eyes when I see them. Besides you know t hate him, don’t you? This afternoon wasn’t the first time he’s insulted me. How old are you?” “Twenty-five.” “College man?” voice. I like een with Mr.
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Page Thirty One “Yes.” “Football?” “Yes; half-back.” “What college?” He opened his lips to answer, then closed them without having made a sound. She studied him for a few moments, a slow smile of understanding grow- ing on her face. “So,” she murmured, ‘“‘you don’t want to tell me because I might look you up. If I did that I might find out that there was no Street on the team. Is that so?”’ She laughed softly. The young man was plainly taken aback. It- seemed to him that her ingenuity was little short of devilish. He wasn't frightened but he was much chagrined. He studied her for a while, then shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Suppose you are right,’ he said slowly, ‘‘what difference will it make?” “It may make all the difference in the world. You have your own reasons for being with Jim Walters and submitting to his tyrannical moods. You are not the sort to remain with him without reasons which existed before you entered his employ. Admit you detest him!” He took a sudden resolve. ‘‘Yes,’’ he answered in a low tone, “‘I do.” “Well,” she laughed, ‘‘you needn't look at me like that; I shan’t betray you. I detest him, too. You see, it is a bond between us. Let us be allies. You don’t trust me, do you? You are wondering why a wife shquld so detest her husband as to wish to harm him. I'll tell you in a few words: He was about to make a pauper of my father, when he saw me and liked my looks. I was the price of his letting up on my father. I might have forgiven him if he hadn’t been such a brute. Your story, if you please!’ “He betrayed, ruined and I think killed my father- Broke his heart I mean.”’ “Yes, his pathway is lined with broken hearts and ruined lives. I don’t believe he would enjoy a success that didn’t mean misery and ruin for others. What is your right name?” “Everett Lane.” "T never heard it before. Well, are we allies?” The alliance didn’t please him, however sorry he was for the woman before him. He felt that she was the type of woman who would use him for her own ends, and make Bophing of casting him aside when she had no further use for him. ‘‘I don’t see that [ have any choice,’’ he answered. “You are frank, anyhow,” she laughed. hands on it!” She put out a white, carefully manicured hand, which he took. He was amazed at the firmness and vigor of her grip, but he couldn’t help thinkin that he much preferred the feel of Beryl’s little hand. “We must have a long talk,”’ she said as she with- drew her hand. ‘‘We can’t have that now for dinner will be served in a few minutes, but I will arrange for it. Just now I will play something while you stand by me and turn the music.”’ : She took her seat on the bench in front of the piano and selected a sheet of music. He looked at it. “I like Tschaikowsky,” he said. She shrugged her white shoulders. ‘‘I like his music well enough, but it is too full of sentiment for me to play well. Iam brilliant, but haven’t much feeling.” She began to play. ‘‘Watch the mirror,” she said in a low tone. ; He had an uneasy feeling over the suddenly developed relation between them. He felt as if he had been caught in a trap. If it had been a man he wouldn’t have minded, but to have a secret arrange- ment with this beautiful woman, even if she had no hysical attraction for him made him uncomfortable. erhaps the fact that she seemed so completely at her ease made the matter worse for him. He followed the notes, hardly conscious whether she played well or ill. “Where do you live in the city?”’ she asked as she played. “T have a bachelor apartment,’’ he answered. “Where?” she demanded almost peremptorily. He gave her the address, adding, ‘‘You see it is not the nicest neighborhood, but I couldn’t afford anything better.” “It’s good enough for the purpose,” she said. “I’ll be around some evening next week, and we'll talk things over.” : The young man had forgotten all about the mirror, but, remembering, looked up. There in the doorway stood Walters, an ugly look on his face. (To be Continued) “Shake Dogs or Children —Which? (Continued from Page ) it is a mistake to think that dogs are rabid only in muggy dog days. During the coldest weather of last winter there’ was an incipient epidemic of hydro- phobia in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. In several cities the authorities ordered that all dogs should be muzzled or on leash on the streets. In some localities the order was to be in force for a month, but it was found advisable to extend the time to two months or longer. We are all familiar with the type of man who keeps a big dog, but can’t get a wife or keep one. The dog follows him around and the man exhibits him with pride to all the store and garage and street- corner loafers and talks about the dog’s points. He flatters himself with his display of knowledge; and the dog flatters his vanity too, for as an editorial writer so well phrased it recently, ‘The most worth- less of human beings can have some miserable dog licking his feet and looking up to him as his su- perior.” One day this dog reverts to its brute instincts and attacks a child, tears its clothing and its flesh, savagely and with intent to kill. The owner reverts to his brute instincts too. It isn’t his child. He doesn’t care and he won’t shoot the dog; and nobody else can shoot the dog, if he can prove that it never bit anybody before, that he had no knowledge of its viciousness, and upon examination it is disclosed that the dog hasn’t the rabies. When a man shoots or otherwise inflicts serious bodily injury upon another without justifiable cause such as self-defense, the law recognizes that there is the intent to kill and deals with the offender accordingly. But when a dog bites a child, not once but many times, when it jumps at the child and knocks the child down, when it can not be beaten\ off by the frightened and helpless child, but has to be beaten on the head with a club and have its jaws, fastened into clothing and flesh, pried apart—there is no cognizance of the intent to kill unless the dog has a previous record for savagery. The dog may be allowed to live and look for a chance to bite somebody else’s child. The owner of the dog is not an accessory to the crime, and he too may go unpunished. Here is an example from a New York paper of recent date: A policeman heard the screams of a child. He ran to the rear of a building. There he saw a great bulldog with a baby in its jaws, which it was shaking as a terrier does a rat. The policeman was forced to beat the dog into insensibility before it would drop the child. The baby was bitten in twenty places. Doctors say it cannot live. The child had been left on the back porch of the apartments while its mother went to the store. The dog, a fighter, had been kept in the basement by its owner. He went to the basement to get wood and left the door open. The animal escaped, leaped up the stairs and snatched the child from the cradle. This is one of many frightful examples, a typical case of a man who satisfies his brutal instincts, which he calls sporting instincts, through the owner- ship of a fighting pug which he keeps in a city base- ment. The man is no less vicious and brutal than the dog; he is, in fact, a man with a criminal mind. It is a well-known fact that dogs of certain types are inherently vicious. Why should not dogs of this kind be barred from crowded cities or from any communities where they may do harm, just as cer- tain restrictions are put upon immigration? It isa defect of our legal system that we admit the menace of a vicious animal only after the damage is done. The dog is essentially a carnivorous animal. It has been domesticated, but it has not and probably never will be domesticated to the extent that it will not frequently revert to type. Mee peverthsark 0 pege ©) ee She’s a Phone Girl. Know Men? We'll say she does—and she tells what she has found out about them at the switchboard in the lobby of the Hotel Hogarth. A zippy, twelve o'clock feature in next week’s MIDNIGHT. Does She Do Our Modern Couples Need Watching? A chaperone is as welcome in a party these days as a hot-dog at a banquet. But—there’s talk about bringing her back again. Read next week’s MID- NIGHT for the details. Murdered by Telephone! Yes, sir, that’s the situation in one of New York’s most successful mystery plays. A gripping story, worthy of Poe. In next week’s MIDNIGHT Why I Kissed Jack Dempsey And why I will never kiss him again. Florence Walton, America’s best loved dancer, grants an interview to MID- NIGHT'S representative and tells a remarkable story. In next week's issue. She Sold Her Own and Only Clothes! Imagine a wild studio stag-party; a startled, distrait, and beautiful girl; an auction sale of her garments, one by one. That's the situation in “Shame,” a short story with a punch. In next week’s MIDNIGHT. Are You Sure You Are Sane? Thousands of people are walking the streets who are on the verge of in- sanity. One slight push, and they’re over the line. Are you sane? Next week’s MIDNIGHT will answer the question. She Kidnapped the Great Kellar! The seventh of a series of adventures that never before saw print by a cub newspaper reporter tells how the great magician was kidnapped by ‘a woman and why she let him go. Next week’s MIDNIGHT. A dozen other thrills, gasps and surprises in next week’s issue of the latest magazine hit MIDNIGHT
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