A LATE HUNCH FOR LESTER
You might not guess it, but every now and then I connect with some true thought that makes me wiser above the ears. Honest, I do. Sometimes they just come to me by accident, on the fly, as it were. And then again, they don't come so easy.
Take this latest hunch of mine. I know now that my being a high-grade private sec. don't qualify me to hand out any fatherly advice to the female sex. Absolutely it doesn't. And yet, here only a few weeks back, that was just what I was doin'. Oh, I don't mean I was scatterin' it around broadcast. It had to be a particular and 'special case to tempt me to crash in with the Solomon stuff. It was the case of Lester Biggs—and little Miss Joyce.
Now you'd almost think I'd seen too many lady typists earnin' their daily bread and their weekly marcelle waves for me to get stirred up over anything they might do. And as a rule, I don't waste much thought on 'em unless they develop the habit of parkin' their gum on the corner of my desk, or some such trick as that. I sure would be busy if I did more, for here in the Corrugated general offices we have fifteen or twenty more or less expert key pounders most of the time. Besides, it's Mr. Piddie's job to worry over 'em, and believe me he does it thorough.
But somehow this little Miss Joyce party was different. I expect it was the baby blue tam-o'-shanter that got me noticin' her first off. You know that style of lid ain't worn a great deal by our Broadway stenogs. Not the home crocheted kind. Hardly. I should judge that most of our flossy bunch wouldn't be satisfied until they'd swapped two weeks' salary for some Paris model up at Mme. Violette's. And how they did snicker when Miss Joyce first reported for duty wearin' that tam and costumed tacky in something a cross-roads dressmaker had done her worst on.
Miss Joyce didn't seem to mind. By rights she should have been a shy, modest little thing who would have been so cut up that she'd have rushed into the cloak room and spilled a quart of salt tears. But she never even quivers one of her long eyelashes, so Piddie reports. She just comes back at 'em with a sketchy, friendly little smile and proceeds to tackle her work business-like. And inside of ten days she has the lot of 'em eatin' out of her hand.
But while I might feel a little sympathetic toward this stray from the kerosene circuit I didn't let it go so far but what I kicked like a steer when I finds that Piddle has wished her on me for a big forenoon's work.
"What's the idea, Piddie?" says I. "Why do I get one of your awkward squad who'll probably spell 'such' with a t in it and punctuate by the hit-or-miss method?"
"Miss Joyce?" says he, raisin' his eyebrows, pained. "I beg your pardon, Torchy, but she is one of our most efficient stenographers. Really!"
"She don't look the part," says I. "But if you say she is I'll take a chance."
Well, she was all he'd described. She could not only scribble down that Pitman stuff as fast as I could feed the dictation to her, but she could read it straight afterward and the letters she turns out are a joy to look over. From then on I picks her to do all my work, being careful not to let either Mr. Robert or Old Hickory know what an expert I've discovered in disguise.
For one thing she's such a quiet, inoffensive little party. She don't come in all scented with Peau d'Espagne, nor she don't stare at you bored, or pat her hair or polish her nails while you're waitin' to think of the right word. She don't seem to demand the usual chat or fish for an openin' to confide what a swell time she had last night. In fact, she don't make any remarks at all outside of the job in hand, which is some relief when you're scratchin' your head to think what to tell the assistant Western manager about renewin' them dockage contracts.
Yet she ain't one of the scared-mouse kind. She looks you square in the eye when there's any call for it and she don't mumble her remarks when she has something to say. Not Miss Joyce. Her words come out clear and crisp, with a slight roll to the r's and all the final letters sounded, like she'd been taking elocution or something.
In the course of five or six weeks she has shed the blue tam for a neat little hat and has ditched the puckered seam effect dress for a black office costume with white collar and cuffs. She still sticks to partin' her hair in the middle and drawin' it back smooth with no ear tabs or waves to it. So she does look some old-fashioned.
That was why I'm kind of surprised to notice this Lester Biggs begin hoverin' around her at lunch time and toward the closin' hour. She ain't the type Lester usually picks out to roll his eyes at. Not in the least. For of all them young hicks in the bond room I expect Lester is about the most ambitious would-be sport we've got.
You see, I've known Lester Biggs more or less for quite some time. He started favorin' the Corrugated with his services back in the days when I was still on the gate and rated myself the highest paid and easiest worked office boy between Greeley Square and Forty-second Street. And all the good I ever discovered about him wouldn't take me long to tell.
As for the other side of the case—Well, I ain't much on office scandal, but I will say that it always struck me Lester had the kind of a mind that needed chloride of lime on it. I never saw the time when he wasn't stretchin' his neck after some flossy typist or other, and as sure as a new one with the least hint of hair bleach showed up it would mean another affair for Lester. Maybe you know the kind.
And he sure dressed the part, on and off. The Tin-Horn Sport Cut clothes that you see advertised so wide must be made and designed 'special for Lester. I remember he sprung the first pinch-back coat that came into the office. Same way with the slit pockets, the belted vest and other cute little innovations that the Times Square chicken hounds drape themselves in.
I wouldn't quite say that he'd pass for the perfect male, either. Not unless you count the bat ears, face pimples, turkey neck and the cast in one eye as points of beauty. But that don't seem to bother Lester in the least. He knows he has a way with him. His reg'lar openin' is "Hello, Girlie, what you got on the event card for tonight?" and from that to makin' a date at Zinsheimer's dance hall is just a step. Oh, yes, Lester is some gay bird, if you want to call it that.
And all on twenty a week. So of course that interferes some with his great ambition. He used to tell me about it back in the old days when I was on the gate and hadn't sized him up accurate. Chorus girls! If he could only get to know some squab pippin from the Winter Garden or the Follies that would be all he'd ask. He would pick out his favorite from the new musical shows, lug around half-tone pictures of 'em cut from newspapers, and try to throw the bluff that he expected to meet 'em early next week; but as we all knew he never got nearer than the second balcony he never got away with the stuff.
"Suppose by some miracle you did, Lester?" I'd ask him. "What then? Would you blow her to a bowl of chow mein at some chop suey joint, or could you get by with a nut sundae at a cut-rate drug store? And suppose some curb broker was waitin' to take her out to Heather Blossom Inn? You'd put up a hot competition, you would, with nothing but the change from a five left in your jeans."
"Ah, just leave that to me, old son," he'd say, winkin' devilish.
And the one time when he did pull it off I happened to hear about. A friend of his who was usher at the old Hippodrome offered to tow him to a little Sunday night supper at the flat of one of the chorus ladies. Lester went, too, and found a giddy thing of about forty fryin' onions for a fam'ly of five, includin' three half-grown kids and a scene-shiftin' hubby.
That blow seems to discourage Lester for a week or so, since which he has run true to form. He'll run around with lady typists, or girls from the cloak department, or most anything that wears skirts, until they discover what a tight-wad he is and give him the shunt. But his great aim in life is to acquire a lady-friend that he can point out in the second row and hang around for at the stage door about midnight.
So when I sees him flutterin' about Miss Joyce, and her making motions like she was fallin' for him, I didn't quite know what to make of it. Course, now that she's bucked up a bit on her costume she is more or less easy to look at. For a little thing, almost a half portion, as you might put it, she has quite a figure, slim and graceful. And them pansy brown eyes can light up sort of fascinatin', I expect. And being so fresh from the country I suppose she can't dope out what a cheap shimmy lizard Lester is. It's a wonder some of the other typists hadn't put her wise. They're usually good at that. But it looks like they'd missed a trick in her case, for one noon I overhears Lester datin' her up for an evenin' at Zinsheimer's. And when he drifts along I can't resist throwin' out a hint, on my own account.
"With Lester, eh?" says I, humpin' my eyebrows.
"Oh, I know," says Miss Joyce. "But I do love to dance and I—I've been rather lonely, you see."
I saw. And of course after that there was nothing more to say. She didn't tell me as much, but I understand that it got to be a regular thing. You could tell that by the intimate way Lester tips her the wink as he swaggers by. He didn't take any pains to hide it, or to lower his voice when he remarks, "Well, kiddo, see you at eight thirt., eh?"
As long as she kept her work up to the mark, which she does, it wasn't any funeral of mine. I never have yearned to be a volunteer chaperon. But I was kind of sorry for little Miss Joyce. I expect I said something of the kind to Vee, and she was all for having Mr. Piddie give her a good talking to.
"No use," says I. "Piddie wouldn't know how. All he can do is hire 'em and fire 'em, and even that's turnin' his hair gray. It'll all work out one way or another, I expect."
It does, too. But not exactly along the lines I was looking for it to develop. First off, Lester quits the Corrugated. As he'd been on the same job for more'n six years, and gettin' worse at it right along, the blow didn't quite put us out of business. We're still staggerin' ahead.
"What's the scheme, Lester?" says I. "Beatin' the office manager to it?"
"Huh!" says Lester. "I've been plannin' to make a shift for more'n a year. Just waitin' for the right openin'. I got it now."
"The Morgan people sent for you, did they?" says I.
"They might have, at that," says Lester, "only I'm through bein' an office slave for anybody. I'm goin' in with some live wires this time, where I'll have a chance."
But it turns out that he's been taken on as a sidewalk man by a pair of ticket speculators—Izzy Goldman and his pal, who used to run the cigar stand down in the arcade. They handled any kind of pasteboards, from grandstand parade tickets to orchestra seats.
"Yes," says I, "that'll be a great career. Almost in the theatrical game, eh? You'll be knowin' all the pippins now, I expect."
"Watch me," says Lester.
Well, I didn't strain my eyes. I'd have been just as pleased to know that Lester was going to slip out of my young life forever and to forget him complete within the next two days. Only I couldn't. There was Miss Joyce to remind me. Not that she says a word. She ain't the chatty, confidential kind. But it was natural for me to wonder now and then if they was still as chummy as at the start.
He'd been away a month or more I expect, before either of us passed his name, and then it came out accidental. I starts dictatin' a letter to a firm in St. Louis, Lester & Riggs. The name sort of startles Miss Joyce.
"I beg pardon?" says she, her pencil poised over the pad.
"No, not Lester Biggs," says I. "By the way, how is he these days?"
"I'm sure I don't know," says she. "I—I haven't seen him for weeks."
"Oh!" says I. "Kind of thought you'd be droppin' him down the coal shute or something."
She shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head. "It was he who dropped me," says she. "Flat."
"Considerin' Lester," says I, "that's more or less of a compliment."
"I am not so sure of that," says Miss Joyce. "You see, he was quite frank about it. He—he said I had no style or zipp about me. Well, I'm afraid it's true."
"Even so," says I, "it was sweet of him to throw it at you, wasn't it?"
She indulges in a sketchy, quizzin' smile. "I think some of the girls at Zinsheimer's had been teasing him about me," she goes on. "They called me 'the poor little working girl,' I believe. I've no doubt I looked it. But I haven't been able to spend much for clothes—as yet."
"Of course," says I, throwin' up a picture of an invalid mother and a coon-huntin' father back in the alfalfa somewhere. "And so far you ain't missed much by not havin' 'em. I should put Lester's loss down on the credit side if I was makin' the entry."
"He could dance, though," says Miss Joyce, as she gets busy with her pencil again.
Then a few weeks later I was handed my big jolt. We was gettin' out a special report for the directors' meetin' one day after lunch when right in the middle of a table of costs Miss Joyce glances anxious at the clock and drops her note book.
"I'm so sorry," says she, "but couldn't we finish this tomorrow morning?"
"Why, I suppose we might," says I, "if it's anything important."
"It is," says she. "If I'm not there by 3 o'clock the stage manager will not see me at all, and I do so want to land an engagement this time."
"Eh?" says I gawpin'. "Stage manager! You?"
"Why, yes," says she. "You see, I tried once before. I was almost taken on, too. They liked my voice, they said, but I wasn't up on my dancing. So I've been taking lessons of a ballet master. Frightfully expensive. That's where all my money has gone. But I think they'll give me a chance this time. It's for the chorus of that new 'Tut! Tut! Marie' thing, you know, and they've advertised for fifty girls."
I suppose I must have let loose a gasp. This meek, modest young thing, who looked like she wouldn't know a lip-stick from a boiled carrot, plannin' cold-blooded to throw up a nice respectable job and enter herself in the squab market! Why, I wouldn't have been jarred more if Piddie had announced that next season he was going to do bareback ridin' for some circus.
"Excuse me, Miss Joyce," says I, "but I wouldn't say you was just the kind they'd take on."
"Oh, they take all kinds," says she.
"Better brace yourself for a turndown, though," says I, "I see it coming to you. You ain't the type at all."
"Perhaps you don't know," says she, trippin' off to get her hat.
Ever see one of them mobs that turns out when there's a call for a new chorus? I've had to push my way through 'em once or twice up in some of them office buildings along the Rialto, and believe me, it's a weird collection; all sorts, from wispy little flappers who should be in grammar school still, to hard-faced old battle axes who used to travel with Nat Goodwin. So I couldn't figure little Miss Joyce gettin' anything more'n a passing glance in that aggregation. Yet when she shows up in the mornin' she's lookin' sort of smilin' and chirky.
"Well," said I, "did you back out after lookin' 'em over?"
"Oh, no," says she. "I was tried out with the first lot and engaged right away. They're rushing the production, you see, and I happened to fit in. Why, inside of an hour they had twenty of us rehearsing. I'm to be in the first big number, I think—one of the Moonbeam girls. Isn't that splendid?"
"If that's what you want," says I, "I expect it is. But how about the folks back home? What'll they say to this wide jump of yours?"
"I've decided not to tell them anything about it," says she. "Not for a long time, anyway."
"They might hear, though," I suggests. "Just where do you come from?"
"Why, Saskatoun," says she, without battin' an eyelash.
"Oh, all right, if you don't want to tell," says I.
"But I have told you," says she. "Saskatoun."
"Is it a new hair tonic, or what?" says I.
"It's a city," says she. "One of the largest in British Columbia."
"Think of that!" says I. "They don't care how they mess up the map these days, do they? And your folks live there?"
"Most of them," says she. "Two of my brothers are up at Glen Bow, raising sheep; one of my sisters is at Alberta, giving piano lessons; and another sister is doing church singing in Moose Jaw. If I had stayed at home I would be doing something like that. We are a musical family, you know. Daddy is a church organist and wanted me to keep on in the choir and perhaps get to be a soloist, at $50 a month. But I couldn't see it. If I am going to make a living out of my music I want to make a good one. And New York is the place, isn't it!"
"It depends," says I. "You don't think you'll get rich in the 'Tut! Tut! Marie' chorus, do you?"
"Perhaps they'll not keep me in the chorus," says she. "It's the back door, I know, but it was the only way I could get in. And I'm going to work for something better. You'll see."
Yep, I saw. Miss Joyce resigned at the end of the week, and it wasn't ten days before I gets a little note from her saying how she'd been picked out to do a specialty dance and duet with Ronald Breen. Mr. Breen had done the picking himself. And she did hope I would look in some night when the company opened on Broadway.
"I expect we'll have to go; eh, Vee?" says I when I gets home.
"Surely," says Vee.
Well, maybe you've noticed what a hit this "Tut! Tut!" thing has been making. It's about the zippiest, peppiest girl show in town, and that's saying a lot. It's the kind of stuff that makes the tired business man get bright in the eyes and forget how near the sixteenth of January is. I thought first off we'd have to put off seeing it until after Christmas, for when I finally got to the box office there was nothing doing in orchestra seats. Sold out five weeks in advance. But by luck I happens to run across Lester Biggs in the lobby and for five a throw he fixes me up with two places in G, middle row.
"It's a big winner," says he.
"Seen it yourself?" I asks.
"Not yet," says he. "Think I can pull it off tonight, though."
"Good!" says I. "I'll be looking for you out front after the first act."
And, say, when this party who's listed on the program as Jean Jolly comes boundin' in with Ronald Breen I'll admit she had me sittin' up with my ears tinted pink. No use goin' into details about her costume. It's hardly worth while—a little white satin here and there and a touch of black tulle.
"Well!" gasps Vee. "Is that your little Miss Joyce?"
"I can hardly believe it," says I.
"I should hope not," says Vee. "But she is cute, isn't she? And see that kick! Oh-h-h-h!"
I was still red in the face, I expect, when I trails out at the end of the act and discovers Lester leanin' against the lobby wall.
"Say, Torchy," says he husky, "did—did you see her?"
"Miss Joyce?" says I. "Sure. Some pippin in the act, isn't she? Didn't she send you word she was goin' to be in this with Ronald Breen?"
"Me?" says he. "No."
"That's funny," says I. "She told me weeks ago. I hear she's pulling down an even hundred and fifty a week. By next season she'll be starrin'."
"And to think," moans out Lester, "that I passed her up only a few months ago!"
"Yes," says I, "considerin' your chronic ambition, that was once when you were out of luck. And the worst of it is that maybe she was only usin' you to practice on all along. Eh?"
Perhaps it wasn't a consolin' thought to leave with Lester, but somehow I couldn't help grinnin' as I tossed it over. And me, I'm doping out no more advice to young ladies from Saskatoun or elsewhere. I'm off that side-line permanent.