It was a question indeed. The comedian cupped his hands and shouted across the hubbub: “Write a note and put it in a bottle!” It would be somehow painfully appropriate—in a bottle—though the chances of delivery couldn’t be reckoned very brilliant.
Jerome thought of his people—his home—saw everything perhaps more vividly than ever before in his life. If this amazing calamity hadn’t befallen him, where would he be now? At the movies, probably. Yes, he was pretty likely to be at the movies of an evening now that Stella had slipped out of his life. It seemed unlikely he would ever have need of the movies again!
Lili began singing along with the others, her strong and somewhat brazen voice entering in with irrepressible verve. Jerome gazed at her. His heart grew furtively undaunted. As a matter of fact, before long the clerk was almost openly applauding his calamity. And then he even began looking upon it as something he had accomplished himself, in a sense. Certainly nothing could have been accomplished without him.
He had been an obscure clerk, and was an obscure clerk no longer. What would come of all this in the end? Perplexity held him in a rather shivery embrace. But Lili slipped an affectionate arm through his and made him sway with her to the rhythm.
“You can’t have any of my peanuts,
When your peanuts are gone!”
She clapped time with her large, rather beautiful hands.
They romped from song to song, growing more abandoned all the time. “Come on, now!” shouted the impresario joyously, dominating in his irresistible way even the deafening din about him. “Strong on the chorus—swell out on the second bar, and then—piano—piano! Tum te tum tum! Now, then, all together:
‘Little Annie Roonie is my sweetheart!’
Bravo!”