Before the meal was anywhere near ended—in fact, before they reached the orange sorbet, coming between the roast beef au jus and the choice of young chicken with giblet sauce or cold sliced lamb with pickled beets—the Pilkinses knew a great deal about Mr. Royal Harcourt, and Mr. Royal Harcourt knew the Pilkinses were good listeners, and not only good listeners but believing ones as well. So a pleasant hour passed speedily for all three. There, was an especially pleasant moment just at the close of the dinner when Mr. Harcourt invited them to accompany him at ten o’clock on the following morning to the Ziegler studios, and as his guest to witness the lensing of certain episodes destined to figure in the completed film drama of The Prince of the Desert. Speaking for both, Mrs. Pilkins accepted.
“But, Gertrude Maud,” murmured Mr. Pilkins doubtfully as the two of them were leaving the dining-room to hear the orchestra play in the arched inner garden where the poinsettia waved its fiery bannerets aloft, reminding one somewhat of the wagging red oriflamme of a kindred member of the same family—the Irish setter—and the inevitable spoiled childling of every tourist hotel romped to and fro, whining for pure joy, making life a curse for its parents [181] and awakening in the hearts of others reconciling thoughts touching upon the late King Herod, the bald-headed prophet who called the bears down out of the hills, and the style of human sacrifices held to be most agreeable to the tastes of the heathenish god Moloch. “But, Gertrude Maud,” he repeated demurringly as he trailed a pace behind her, seeing she had not heard or seemed not to have heard. In her course Mrs. Pilkins halted so suddenly that a double-stranded necklet of small wooden darning eggs of graduated sizes clinked together smartly.
“Chester,” she stated sharply, “don’t keep bleating out ‘Gertrude Maud’ like that. It annoys me. If you have anything to say, quit mumbling and say it.”
“But, Ger—but, my dear,” he corrected himself plaintively, “we were going to visit the orange groves to-morrow morning. I have already spoken to the automobile man——”
“Chester,” said Mrs. Pilkins, “the orange groves can wait. I understand they have been here for some time. They will probably last for some time longer. To-morrow morning at ten o’clock you and I are going with that nice Mr. Harcourt. It will be an interesting experience and a broadening one. We are here to be broadened. We will see something very worth while, I am convinced of it.”
Indeed, they began to witness events of an acutely unusual nature before ten o’clock. As they came out from breakfast there darted [182] down the lobby stairs at the right a young maiden and a youth, both most strikingly garbed. The young lady wore a frock of broad white-and-black stripes clingingly applied to her figure in up-and-down lines. She had a rounded cheek, a floating pigtail, and very large buckles set upon the latchets of her twinkling bootees. The youth was habited as a college boy. At least he wore a Norfolk jacket, a flowing tie of the Windsor, England, and East Aurora, New York, variety, and trousers which were much too short for him if they were meant to be long trousers and much too long for him if they were meant to be short trousers. Hand in hand, with gladsome outcry, this pair sped through the open doors and vaulted down the porch steps without, as nimbly as the chamois of the Alpine steeps, toward a large touring car, wherein sat a waiting chauffeur, most correctly liveried and goggled.
Close behind them, in ardent pursuit, an elderly, rather obese gentleman, in white waistcoat, white side whiskers and white spats—patently a distressed parent—tore into sight, waving his arms and calling upon the fleeing pair to halt. Yet halted they not. They whisked into the rear seat of the automobile just as the elderly gentleman tripped on a crack in the planking of the veranda and was precipitated headlong into the arms of a fat bellboy who at this exact moment emerged [183] from behind a pillar. It was a very fat bellboy—one that could not have weighed an ounce less than two hundred pounds, nor been an hour less than forty years old—and he was grotesquely comical in a suit of brass buttons and green cloth incredibly tight for him. Locked in each other’s arms the parent and bellboy rolled down the steps—bumpety-bump!—and as progressing thus in close communion they reached the surface of the driveway, a small-town policeman, wearing long chin whiskers and an enormous tin star, ran forward from nowhere in particular, stumbled over their entangled forms and fell upon them with great violence. Then while the three of them squirmed and wriggled there in a heap, the automobile whirled away with the elopers—it was, of course, by now quite plain that they must be elopers—casting mocking, mirthsome glances backward over their diminishing shoulders.
“Slap stick! Rough-house! Cheap stuff! But it goes—somehow it goes. The public stands for it. It passes one’s comprehension.” It was Mr. Royal Harcourt who, standing just behind the Pilkinses, commented in tones of a severe disparagement. They became cognisant also of a man who had been stationed in the grass plot facing the hotel, grinding away at a crank device attached to a large camera. He had now ceased from grinding. Except for the camera man, the disapproving Mr. Harcourt and themselves, no one else within sight [184] appeared to take more than a perfunctory interest in what had just occurred.
“Come with me,” bade Mr. Harcourt when the outraged parent, the fat bellboy and the small-town policeman had picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and taken themselves away. “You have seen one side of this great industry. I propose now to introduce you to another side of it—the artistic side.”
He waved his arm in a general direction, and instantly a small jitneybile detached itself from a flock of jitneybiles stationed alongside the nearer curbing and came curving up to receive them. This city, I may add in passing, was the home of the original mother jitney, and there, in her native habitat, she spawned extensively before she moved eastward, breeding busily as she went.