On the steps outside the rebuffed Merton Gill glanced at his own natty wrist-watch, bought with some of the later wages of his shame. It was the luncheon hour; mechanically he made his way to the cafeteria. He had ceased to rehearse the speech a doughtier Baird would now have been hearing.
Instead he roughly drafted one that Sarah Nevada Montague could not long evade. Even on her dying bed she would be compelled to listen. The practising orator with bent head mumbled as he walked. He still mumbled as he indicated a choice of foods at the cafeteria counter; he continued to be thus absorbed as he found a table near the centre of the room.
He arranged his assortment of viands. “You led me on, that’s what you did,” he continued to the absent culprit. “Led me on to make a laughing-stock of myself, that’s what you did. Made a fool of me, that’s what you did.”
“All the same, I can’t help thinking he’s a harm to the industry,” came the crisp tones of Henshaw from an adjoining table. The rehearsing orator glanced up to discover that the director and the sunny-faced brown and gray man he called Governor were smoking above the plates of their finished luncheon.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” suggested the cheerful governor.
“But see what he does: he takes the good old reliable, sure-fire stuff and makes fun of it. I admit it’s funny to start with, but what’ll happen to us if the picture public ever finds that out? What’ll we do then for drama—after they’ve learned to laugh at the old stuff?”
“Tush, tush, my boy!” The Governor waved a half—consumed cigarette until its ash fell. “Never fear. Do you think a thousand Jeff Bairds could make the picture public laugh at the old stuff when it’s played straight? They laughed last night, yes; but not so much at the really fine burlesque; they guffawed at the slap-stick stuff that went with it. Baird’s shrewd. He knows if he played straight burlesque he’d never make a dollar, so notice how he’ll give a bit of straight that is genuine art, then a bit of slap-stick that any one can get. The slap-stick is what carries the show. Real burlesque is criticism, my boy; sometimes the very high-browest sort. It demands sophistication, a pretty high intelligence in the man that gets it.
“All right. Now take your picture public. Twenty million people every day; not the same ones every day, but with same average cranial index, which is low for all but about seven out of every hundred. That’s natural because there aren’t twenty million people in the world with taste or real intelligence—probably not five million. Well, you take this twenty million bunch that we sell to every day, and suppose they saw that lovely thing last night—don’t you know they’d all be back to-night to see a real mopping mother with a real son falsely accused of crime—sure they’d be back, their heads bloody but unbowed. Don’t worry; that reliable field marshal, old General Hokum, leads an unbeatable army.”
Merton Gill had listened to the beginning of this harangue, but now he savagely devoured food. He thought this so—called Governor was too much like Baird.
“Well, Governor, I hope you’re right. But that was pretty keen stuff last night. That first bit won’t do Parmalee any good, and that Buck Benson stuff—you can’t tell me a little more of that wouldn’t make Benson look around for a new play.”