Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

Nor did it occur to Gillespie, any more than it occurred to Herzog, assisting him in the day’s job, to take the old man into their confidence touching on what of theme and development had gone before in the making of this masterpiece of an historical production, or on what would follow after. Players of character bits are not supposed to know what the thing’s about. Indeed, there are times when the patron of the silent drama, going to his favorite theater and viewing the completed work, is inclined to believe that some of the principal performers could have had but a hazy conception of what it was all about. Nobody, one figures, ever explained the whys and wherefores to them, either. However, that is neither here nor there, this being no critique of the technique of the motion-picture art but merely an attempt to describe an incident in the filming of one particular scene in one particular motion-picture, namely the epic entitled “Two Lovers of War-Time.”

There should have been a broad sea of ripening wheat rolling upward along a hillside slope to a broken stone wall. Gillespie, usually a stickler for the lesser verities, was compelled to forego the ripening wheat because, while outdoor stagecraft has gone far in these later times and studio stagecraft has gone still farther, you cannot, in California in the fall of the year, months after the standing crop has been cut, artificially produce a plausible semblance of many acres of nodding grain all ready for the reaper. So he contented himself with a stubble field, and privately hoped no caption observer would record the error. But the traditional stone fence, which is so famous in song and story, was there. And thither the Captain was presently escorted.

“Now, here’s the layout,” specified Herzog, who actively was in charge of this phase of the undertaking. “You’re supposed to be the only civilian”—Herzog pronounced it civil-an—“the only civilian in the whole town that didn’t beat it when the enemy came along. All the rest of ’em took it on the run to the woods but you stuck because you ain’t scared of nobody. You’re one of these game old patr’ots, see? So you just loaded up your old rifle and you declared yourself in. So that makes you the hero of the whole outfit, for the time being. Get me?... Good! Well, then—now follow me clos’t, because this is where the real action starts—the very next morning you happen to be out here on the edge of the town and right over yonder is where the big doings bust out. The book that the chief got the notion for these shots out of don’t say how you got here in the first place but we’re taking it for granted, me and Gillespie are, that you’re just fiddling around looking for trouble on your own hook. The book does say, though—it’s a poetry book—that your gang get a slant at you when you show up and they start in making funny cracks and asking you where you got them funny clothes you got on and asking you what you think you’re going to do anyhow with that there big old musket you’re lugging with you.

“But I figure that would kind of slow up the action, so I’ve changed it around some from the way the book’s got it. The way it’s going to be is the battle gets going good before you join in. One gang—one army, I mean—is behind that fence and the other army comes running up towards ’em from down at the foot of that hill yonder, whooping and yelling and shooting and all. And with that, you cut in right between ’em, all by your lonesome, and take a hand. That brings you out prominent because you’re the only guy in sight that’s dressed different from everybody else. All the rest of these guys are in soldier’s clothes. So this gives you your chance to hog the picture for a w’ile. It’s good and fat for you along here.

“Well, then, that other army that I’ve just been telling you about comes charging on right up to the wall and there’s close-in fighting back and forth—hand-to-hand stuff, what I mean—for two or three minutes before the break comes and the gang that is due to be licked decide they’ve had enough and start retreating. And all this time you’re right in the thick of it, shooting first, and then when your gun’s empty you club it by the barrel and fight with it that way. Don’t be afraid of being too rough, neither. These extras are under orders to go at one another raw, so it’ll be more like a battle ought to be. Them that puts the most steam into it will get a finnuf slipped to ’em. They know that, and I wouldn’t be surprised but what probably a couple of dozen of ’em should get laid out in earnest; so you needn’t feel backward about wading in and doing your share. Just put yourself right into it, that’s the idea, and cut loose regardless. I’ll be off to one side cueing you through my megaphone which way to go when they first pick you up for the long shots, but after that it’s all up to you. Don’t think about the camera nor nothing else. Don’t look at a camera. Don’t look around, even to see where any of the cameras are. But then, seeing you told me yourself only last week about having fought in one of them regular wars, I guess I don’t need to tell you how to go to it. It’ll all come back to you in less than a minute, I’ll bet you.... Now then, come on over here and let me get you set.”

Herzog’s optimistic prediction was justified. In less than a minute it did come back to Captain Teal. The first preliminary crackle of musketry fire brought it back to him with a mighty surge of clamoring, swirling memories. The first whiff of acrid powder smoke in his nostrils, the first sight of those ragged gray uniforms, those dusty blue uniforms, changed the memories into actualities. The weight of sixty years slipped off his shoulders; the rich saps of youth mounted for a little passing time into his pithy marrows, giving swiftness to his rickety legs and strength to his withered arms. It was proof of what an imagination fired by vivid reminders of clanging bygone things could do for an ancient’s body.

Headlong once more into battle went Captain Teal, and as he did he uttered sundry long-drawn wolfish yells, one yell right behind another, until you would have thought, had you been there to listen, that his throat surely must split itself wide open.

In he went, and he took sides. He took the wrong side. That is to say, and speaking from strictly a technical standpoint, he took the wrong side. But from Captain Teal’s standpoint he took the right side and the only side which with honor he might take. To be sure, no one beforehand had advised him specifically in this matter of taking sides. It had been Herzog’s oversight that he had not dwelt more clearly upon this highly important point, which he had assumed his venerable pupil would understand. And now it was Herzog’s handicap, as the Captain’s intention became plain, that Herzog’s hoarsely bellowed commands—commands at the outset but merging swiftly into harsh and agonized outcries—should fall upon that ear of Captain Teal which was his deafer ear.