"'I'm on!' grinned the property man. So were the others. Everybody in that house had been awakened in the dead of night by the malicious clanking of the steam pipes, and everybody recognized the bit of every-day. The audience the next night was not less quick of perception, and the diversion proved, as you probably know, to be one of the most effective bits of comedy in 'Girls.'"
All this was written two years ago. Quiet Corners and The Other House are deserted now, and the beautiful things that filled them, and the residence in Fortieth Street, have been distributed. A part of the collection was willed to the Metropolitan Museum. It is pathetic to reflect that the first Fitch play to win unqualified praise from the critics was produced after the death of its author. Yet "The City" was not a better piece than "The Climbers", or "Her Own Way", or "The Girl With the Green Eyes", or "The Truth." Clyde Fitch was dead; therein lay the difference. The living Clyde Fitch always was treated by the journalistic reviewers as a sort of malefactor, as a man whose deliberate intent was to do bad work. Only his intimates know how keenly he felt this. "Newspaper praise," he said to me once, "is for the dramatist on his way up or his way down; never for the dramatist at the top." Clyde Fitch was the most brilliant man who ever wrote for the stage in America. Heaven rest his soul!
Augustus Thomas conducts rehearsals from an orchestra stall in the body of the theater, whence he shouts instructions through a megaphone. I have often printed the story of the retort courteous which he is said to have made to J. J. Shubert when that impressario interrupted a rehearsal of "The Witching Hour", but, in this connection, perhaps the tale will bear repetition.
According to my informant, the author of "Arizona" was intent upon a serious scene when Mr. Shubert, who was financially interested in the production, stopped the players, and, turning to Mr. Thomas, remarked: "I think this would be a good place for some witty dialogue."
"Yes?" replied Mr. Thomas. "As for instance?"
He is a bold and a foolish man who throws himself upon the point of the playwright's verbal poignard, for, among those who know him, Mr. Thomas is as famous for his skill with speech as for his skill with the pen. He smiles as he thrusts, but the results are none the less sanguinary. "I thought Thomas was a man", Paul Armstrong is reported to have said of him, "until I saw him take a handkerchief from his sleeve. Men have hip pockets for their handkerchiefs."
"I had," quoth Mr. Thomas, when he heard the remark, "until I began to have my clothes made by a good tailor!"
This ready wit makes the dramatist one of the best, if not the best post prandial speaker in New York. Never a banquet at which he talks but the street rings the next day with quips of his making. "The trouble with amateur carvers", he said at the Friars' dinner to John Drew, "is that the gravy so rarely matches the wall paper." On another occasion he characterized a fatuous argument as being "like a chorus girl's tights, which touch every point and cover nothing."
