To the enlarged eyes of the Pilkinses strange phases of life were recurringly revealed as the vehicle which their guide had chartered progressed along the wide suburban street, beneath the shelter of the pepper trees and the palms. Yet the residential classes living thereabout appeared to view the things which transpired with a languid, not to say a bored, manner; and as for Mr. Harcourt, he, sitting in front alongside the driver, seemed scarcely to notice them at all.
For example: Two automobiles, one loaded with French Zouaves and the other with Prussian infantrymen, all heavily armed and [185] completely accoutred, whizzed by them, going in the opposite direction. A most winsome, heavily bejewelled gypsy lass flirted openly with an affectionate butler beneath the windows of a bungalow, while a waspish housemaid, evidently wrought to a high pitch by emotions of jealousy, balefully spied upon them from the shelter of an adjacent shrubbery clump. Out of a small fruit store emerged a benevolent, white-haired Church of England clergyman, of the last century but one, in cassock, flat hat and knee breeches. With him walked a most villainous-appearing pirate, a wretch whose whiskered face was gashed with cutlass scars and whose wicked legs were leathered hip-deep in jack boots. These two were eating tangerines from the same paper bag as they issued forth together.
The car bearing our friends passed a mansion, the handsomest upon the street. Out from its high-columned portals into the hot sunshine staggered a young man whose lips were very red and whose moustache was very black, with great hollows beneath his eyes and white patches at his temples—a young man dressed in correct evening attire, who, pausing for a moment, struck his open hand to his forehead with a gesture indicative of intense despair—you somehow opined he had lost all at the gaming table—then reeled from sight down a winding driveway. One glimpsed that his glistening linen shirt bosom was of a pronounced saffron cast, [186] with collar and tie and cuffs all of the same bilious tone to match.
“Noticed the yellow, didn’t you?” asked Mr. Harcourt. “That means he’s been doing indoor stuff. Under the lights yellow comes out white.”
At the end of a long mile the jitney halted at a gateway set in a high wooden wall beyond which might be seen the peaks of a glass-topped roof. About this gateway clustered a large assemblage of citizens of all ages and conditions, but with the young of both sexes predominating. As the young women uniformly wore middy blouses and the young men sport shirts, opened at the neck, there were bared throats and wide sailor collars wherever one looked.
“Extra people,” elucidated their host. “They get three a day—when they work. We’ll probably use a lot of them to-day.”
Within the inclosure a new world unfolded itself for the travellers from the Atlantic seaboard—in fact, sections of several new worlds. At the heels of Mr. Harcourt they threaded their way along a great wooden stage that was open, front and top, to the blue skies, and as they followed after him they looked sideways into the interior of a wrecked and deserted Belgian farmhouse; and next door to that into a courtroom now empty of everything except its furnishings; and next door to that into a gloomy dungeon with barred windows and painted canvas walls. They took a turn across a dusty stretch of earth beyond the far end of the [187] segmented stage, and, lo, they stood in the gibbering midriff of an Oriental city. Behind all was lath, furring and plaster, chicken wire, two-by-fours and shingle nails; but in front ’twas a cross-section of teeming bazaar life. How far away seemed 373 Japonica Avenue, Brooklyn, then!
An energetic man in laced boots and a flannel shirt—Mr. Harcourt called him the director—peered angrily into the perspective of the scene and, waving a pasteboard megaphone in command, ordained that a distant mountain should come ten feet nearer to him. Alongside of this young man Mohammed was an amateur. For the mountain did obey, advancing ten feet, no more and no less. Half a score of young men in cowboy garb enshrouded themselves in flowing white draperies, took long, tasselled spears in their hands, and swung themselves upon the backs of horses—and, behold, a tribe of Bedouins trotted through the crowded, winding way, scattering mendicants, priests, camel drivers and peddlers from before their path.
Upon the edge of all this Chester K. Pilkins hovered as one entranced. He had lost Mrs. Pilkins; he was separated from Mr. Harcourt.
He became aware of three damsels of tender years who sat in a row upon a pile of rough lumber near at hand. They wore flowing robes of many colours; they were barefooted, their small toes showing pleasantly pink and white below the hems of their robes, and their arms [188] were drawn primly behind them. He watched them. Although manifestly having no part in the scene then being rehearsed for filming, they continued to hold their arms in this restrained and presumably uncomfortable attitude, as though they might be practising some new form of a deep-breathing exercise.