THE CANDY BUTCHER TALKS ABOUT A LOVE AFFAIR AND HIS ENCOUNTER WITH THE BUCKWHEAT MAN.
The Candy Butcher of the Big Show looked like a cut-out in a Sunday supplement. He was the best dressed man in the outfit, and no matter what he was doing and where he was doing it he always looked fixed up, and he felt it.
His pants were always creased whether the show was doing a run in the large city or playing the one-nighters on a single-track jerk-water beyond the Wabash. He never wore his coat when working, and his loud linen would have stopped a limited with one flash from the tower. He was there with the pink underwear, and his stockings had more kinds of color in them than the side of the band wagon when the season was new. The Candy Butcher was always dressed, and when he got behind the counter to pull off the “Five tonight, good people!” gag he would have made the window of an East Side gents’ furnishing store drop the curtain. The Candy Butcher didn’t mix in much with the men in the outfit. He had a chemical moustache that he zephyred with a velvet voice, and he was always aces with the ladies. When Section One was pulling out for a long Sunday jump, be sure of Him for the day coach with the girls. He was good at that, and, while he didn’t always make a landing, he managed generally to get his bowline fast to the pier before the current caught him.
He always wore his coat in the meal tent, but he took it off right after supper and carried it on his arm. The make-up didn’t miss the ulster much, for he had on a vest that was three strikes and out for rainbow colors—one of those rum omelette tinted things that a Philadelphia button buyer puts on for Saturday night when he’s waiting at the stage door for some spotlight Sadie. He was there with the cheap tailors, all right.
The squatters on the ring bank were just settling for the afternoon gab while the equestrian director, sore because he couldn’t get away to keep a date, was rearranging the horse acts with a piece of a pencil on the back of the night’s card. The Candy Butcher came through a crevice in the tent and stopped to talk to the Saw Dust Spreader, who was standing behind the wardrobe basket pulling on his plush pants.
“What you dressin’ for?” said the Candy Butcher.
“Oh, they’re gettin’ cheap,” said the Saw Dust Spreader. “I’ve got to double for an object holder, an’ I’m up for the leaps right after the entree.”
“What do you care,” said the Candy Butcher, “long as peppermint is striped?”
Then he laughed at his own little trade journal joke. He was full of those. He was always reading song books and joke budgets when waiting to get up on the blue boards to sell tickets for the concert after the show. He came across the track and joined the gang.
“Gee!” said the Side Show Spieler, who was always good on the opening line, “youse dressed up for fair tonight! Looks like youse goin’ to a birthday party.”
“Not for me,” replied the Candy Butcher, as he put another piece of gum under the mustache. “Cut out the parties for Willie in the Summer an’ after this in the winter no more front parlor talks for me after ma is in bed an’ the old man is out in the cold switchin’ down in the railroad yard.”
“Sore again,” said the Concert Manager; “you’ve always got your kick comin’ on sumthin’.”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” said the Candy Butcher, “but you fellows is allus runnin’ me in when it comes to any girl talk. Say, I ain’t the masher of this outfit, take it from me. If I could do the look killin’ an’ have ’em runnin’ me like the boy what does the principal bareback—the popcorn and the soft drinks—well, no more for Jamesie.”
The gang sort of warmed up to this talk, so he let her out another notch and began.
“Say,” he continued, “youse fellows is allus lookin’ for sumthin’ soft. Well, say, I’ve got a game for this season that will kill ’em. No more kicks over the lemonade tub for me. I’ve got ’em all skinned on the sour juice game. Say, you may not know it, but it’s a losin’ game when you’r runnin’ to one-nighters and sellin’ lemon juice. It looks good to see me hollerin’ over the chunk of ice an’ takin’ in the half dimes while I’m passin’ out the cold drink an’ the peanuts; but, say, you never thought how many of them nicks it takes to buy a box of lemons. All right, all right in the city, bo’, for the yellow boys, but when you are run out in the meadows it’s diff’rent, diff’rent.
“So, says I, during the winter when I’m managin’ me penny arcade wid the talkin’ machines, says, ’ll get up a scheme that will make the lemons back to the shady groves for you, no more fore me. An’, say, I gits me think tank on it and I invents sumthin’. Say, you’ll laugh, but I pulled it off this afternoon, an’, say, they all fell for once.”
“What is it, Bill?” asked the Old Grafter, always ready for a new shot at the purse.
“‘What is it?’ Well, say! You know how them guys is stringin’ you about fake lemonade, ’cause you ain’t got no yellow slices floatin’ on the top of the tub. Well, what is you goin’ to do when lemons is 45 per, an’ even the barkeeps is usin’ the acid for the sour. Well, me, I just has a dozen lemon slices made out of celluloid, an’, say, Bill, you can’t tell ’em from the real, ’pon my word, boy, when they is floatin’ aroun’ in the tub after I has poured in me water, me citric acid and me sugar. Why, say, it looks like one of them things at a Fresh Air give-out, where everything is dun on the level, ’cause the reporters is watchin’. I jes’ works me celluloid slices on the stan’, an’ when biz is dun wipes ’em off, puts ’em in the box, an’ theyse jes’ as good as new, an’ there’s more comin’ to the Dime Savin’ for Will, an’ that’s no song book wit.”
The crowd eyed him in silence with that awe that meets a pack of undergraduates when they first gaze upon the man who discovered some new chemical analysis they never expect to understand.
The Saw Dust Spreader joined the crowd just then looking like a cheap leading man in a ten and twenty “Carmen,” with the red pants and the little coat. It was he for gossip, so he broke in.
“Yes, you’re pretty good,” he said to the Candy Butcher, remembering the laugh he got when he came across the tan bark. “But, say, where was you all last week? No lyin’ now, Willie, ’cause I’m on, dead on.”
“Well, I dunno that it’s any secret,” said the Candy Butcher. “I dun me duty an’ I suffered for it.”
The gang looked like a listening party, so he began to reel:
“Say, it’s pretty tough when a fellow starts out to do the right thing by a little lady and gets the flag. It jes’ shows that whenever you gits to dreamin’ good somebody is goin’ to give you an alarm clock finish an’ let you wake up with a shriek. Remember two seasons ago, when we was workin’ the Congress of Nations gag in the manager’s tent? Well, me it is who meets a little lady who is doin’ the bead stitchin’ in the gypsy village. She’s a pretty little thing an’ quietlike. Well, she seems lonesome like an’ one wet night I carries her across the lot when the mud is up to your knees. She seems to like it an’ we has a long talk in the car.
“It seems that she used to work in a bean place where she is called Number 8. I thinks that is funny, so I allus calls her Number 8.
“Seems like her folks was sore on her for troopin’, an’ she comes to me for sympathy. Well, she had me stoppin’ the booze before we was two weeks out, an’ I was gettin’ quiet in me gab and cuttin’ down on the swear talk. She tells me the way she gets into the circus is that a big guy what was engagin’ people for the Congress used to eat his butter cakes at her table, an’ he keeps on tellin’ her what a fine life it is to be an actress, an’, as he has been readin’ about it in books, she throws up the waitin’ job and joins out. The big guy gets half of her first week for the gettin’ her the job.
“But it seems that when Number 8 pulls out of the bean place that she breaks the heart of the guy with the white cap that cooks the buckwheats in the window. He’s been sweet on her from the first day she hollered the hot cakes an’ he pulls ’em off the griddle an’ looks into her eyes. Well, this guy takes a solemn oath that he’ll kill the bloke that makes his Mamie give up waitin’ an’ go troopin’. He never gets next to the big jay what gave her the job, but when he was doin’ the big city he sees me chasin’ her home every night. He gives me a look I don’t like, an’ I asks Number 8 what it means.
“‘Oh, don’t mind him’ she says, ‘he used to belong to my euchre.’
“Now, if I’d been wise I’d a-known Number 8 was connin’, for what did that little fairy know about euchre parties? I knows now that she was pullin’ off some speech she heard in the theatre where the lady shoots the dook across the card table because he brings the coachman into the parlor to get a drink while the other dook is sayin’ his good-by speech. I is too sweet on the fairy then to know that she’s connin’ me.
“Well, jes’ the last week we was playin’ New York, who does I meet in the park lookin’ at the fish but Number 8. She looks so sweet an’ nice that it all comes back, an’ me up an’ speaks. She says sorter haughty:
“‘Who are you, sir? Whom are you addressin’?
“Say, that hit me like a blast, when all of a sudden I get a welt across the head wid sumthin’ that is iron. Say, I falls, but is up, and though the knock has given me the blood, I see that it’s the guy what cooks the buckwheats in the window who was tryin’ to do the killin’. An’ say, he has run out of his bean place an’ hit me wid the cake turner. I grasps him, an’ it’s catch-as-catch-can, an’ Number 8 screamin’ on the bench. I gives him a couple of good ones when in a jiffy it’s rainin’ plates an’ coffee cups, an’ I’m gettin, ’em on the face. Say, his whole gang from the bean shop was out in their white coats, throwin’ the crockery an’ me gettin’ it.
“I knows the show is shut up an’ help is a long way off. Somebody yells, ‘Lick the brute,’ an’ I gets another pie plate in the eye.
“‘What’s he done?’ says a cab driver.
“‘He insulted me wife,’ said the buckwheat cake man.
“I tried to explain, but he gives me another one with the cake-turner an’ I’m on the asphalt.
“I’se gettin’ it good, an’ I sees I must get help or cut the season for the city ward. So I yells ‘Hey, Rube!’
“Well, what do you think? There was a couple of old tramps a-sleepin’ on a bench, an’ when they hears me scream, me on me back wid the buckwheat man sittin’ on me, I sees ’em move, I yells it again, an’ one of them wearies says:
“‘That sounds familiar-like to me.’
“‘Hey, Rube!’ I gives it again, an’, say, they gets in, an’ they put that waiter gang into a pile that looks like a hash brown in a spill.”
“Well, what happened to you?” said the Canvasman, who was always there for the battle tales.
“Me, say, I gets it all. A couple of dinnys pulls me to a box, an’ in the cell all night for me. An’, say, if it hadn’t been for James A., Lord bless his soul, me to the island for winter quarters an’ in stripes.”
“But what becomes of the fairy?” says the Saw Dust Spreader, who always likes to know the finish.
“What becomes of her?” says the Candy Butcher, feeling a couple of scars. “I hears it all later. She had married the guy an’ moves over to Jersey. He’s keepin’ a saloon, an’ she’s cookin’ the oysters. He gives one with every drink.”