What's-His-Name

by George Barr McCutcheon

On Broadway he was quite another person. He knew his Broadway from one end to the other—that is to say, he knew that side of the “Great White Way” which stares you in the face and rebukes you for staring back—the outside of Broadway. He had been on and off Broadway for a matter of five years and yet he had never recovered from the habit of turning out for every pedestrian he met, giving the 6 other man the right of way instead of holding to his own half of it, sometimes stepping in puddles of water to do so and not infrequently being edged off the curbstone by an accumulation of the unexpected.

Once in a while during his peregrinations some one recognised him and bowed in a hesitating manner, as if trying to place him, and at such times he responded with a beaming smile and a half-carried-out impulse to stop for a bit of a chat, but always with a subsequent acceleration of speed on discovering that the other fellow seemed to be in a hurry. They doubtless knew him for Miss Duluth’s husband, but for the life of them they couldn’t call him by name. Every one understood that Nellie possessed a real name, but no one thought to ask what it was.

Moreover, Nellie had a small daughter whose name was Phoebe. She unquestionably was a collaboration, but every one who knew the child spoke of her as that “darling little girl of Nellie’s.” The only man in New York who appeared to know Nellie’s husband by name was the postman, and he got it second-hand.

At the stage door of the theatre he was known 7 as Miss Duluth’s husband, to the stage hands and the members of the chorus he was What’s-His-Name, to the principals he was “old chap,” to Nellie herself he was Harvey, to Phoebe he was “daddy,” to the press agent he was nameless—he didn’t exist.

You could see Nellie in big red letters on all the billboards. She was inevitable. Her face smiled at you from every nook and corner—and it was a pretty face, too—and you had to get your tickets of the scalpers if you wanted to see her in person any night in the week, Sundays excepted. Hats, parasols, perfumes, and face powders were named after her. It was Nellie here and Nellie there and Nellie everywhere. The town was mad about her. It goes without saying that her husband was not the only man in love with her.

As Harvey—let me see—oh, never mind—What’s-His-Name—ambled up Broadway on the morning of his introduction into this homely narrative he was smiled at most bewitchingly by his wife—from a hundred windows—for Nellie’s smile was never left out of the lithographs (he never missed seeing one of them, you may be sure)—but it never occurred to him 8 to resent the fact that she was smiling in the same inviting way to every other man who looked.

He ambled on. At Forty-second Street he turned to the right, peering at the curtained windows of the Knickerbocker with a sort of fearful longing in his mild blue eyes, and kept on his way toward the Grand Central Station. Although he had been riding in and out of the city on a certain suburban train for nearly two years and a half, he always heaved a sigh of relief when the gate-tender told him he was taking the right train for Tarrytown. Once in a great while, on matinée days, he came to town to luncheon with Nellie before the performance. On Sundays she journeyed to Tarrytown to see him and Phoebe. In that way they saw quite a bit of each other. This day, however, he was taking an earlier train out, and he was secretly agitated over the possibility of getting the wrong one. Nellie had sent word to the theatre that she had a headache and could not have luncheon with him.

He was not to come up to her apartment. If he had known a human being in all New York with whom he could have had luncheon, he would 9 have stayed in town and perhaps gone to a theatre. But, alas, there was no one! Once he had asked a low comedian, a former member of Nellie’s company, but at the time out of a job and correspondingly meek, to luncheon with him at Rector’s. At parting he had the satisfaction of lending the player eleven dollars. He hoped it would mean a long and pleasant acquaintance and a chance to let the world see something of him. But the low comedian fell unexpectedly into a “part” and did not remember Nellie’s husband the next time he met him. He forgot something else as well. Harvey’s memory was not so short. He never forgot it. It rankled.

He bought a noon extra and found a seat in the train. Then he sat up very straight to let people see that they were riding in the same car with the great Nellie Duluth’s husband. Lucky dog! Every one was saying that about him, he was sure. But every one else had a noon extra, worse luck!

After a while he sagged down into the seat and allowed his baby-blue eyes to fall into a brown study. In his mind’s eye he was seeing a thousand miles beyond the western bank of 10 the Hudson, far off into the quiet streets of a town that scarcely had heard the name of Nellie Duluth and yet knew him by name and fame, even to the remotest nook of it.