“Chester, I wish for my sake you would refrain from keeping on saying ‘but.’ And please quit interrupting.”
“You see—it’s like this,” explained Mr. Harcourt: “It’s the scene at the dock when the heroine gets home. You two are to be two of the passengers—the director says he’ll be very glad to have you take part. I just spoke to him. There will be many others in the scene—extras, you know. Think you’d like it? It will be an experience.”
“As you say, Mr. Harcourt, it will be an experience,” said Mrs. Pilkins. “I accept with pleasure. So does my husband.”
Promptly ensued then action, and plenty of it. With many others, recruited from the ranks of the populace, the Chester Pilkinses were herded into a corner of the open-faced stage at the back side of the bazaar—a corner which the two presiding genii of that domain, known technically and respectively as the boss carpenter and the head property man, had, by virtue of their magic and in accordance with an order from their overlord, the director, transformed, even as one waited, from something else into the pierhead of a New York dock. With these same others our two friends mounted a steep flight of steps behind the scenes, and then, shoving sheeplike through a painted gangway, [191] in a painted bulkhead of a painted ship, they flocked down across a canvas-sided gangplank to the ostensible deck of the presumable pier, defiling off from left to right out of lens range, the while they smiled and waved fond greetings to supposititious friends.
When they had been made to do this twice and thrice, when divers stumbling individuals among them had been corrected of a desire to gaze, with the rapt, fascinated stare of sleep-walkers, straight into the eye of the machine, when the director was satisfied with his rehearsal, he suddenly yelled “Camera!” and started them at it all over again.
In this instant a spell laid hold on Chester Pilkins. As one exalted he went through the picture, doing his share and more than his share to make it what a picture should be. For being suddenly possessed with the instinct to act—an instinct which belongs to all of us, but which some of us after we have grown up manage to repress—Chester acted. In his movements there was the unstudied carelessness which is best done when it is studied; in his fashion of carrying his furled umbrella and his strapped steamer rug—the Ziegler
Company had furnished the steamer rug but the umbrella was his own—there was natural grace; in his quick start of recognition on beholding some dear one in the imaginary throng waiting down on the pier out of sight there was that art which is the highest of all arts.
[192]
With your permission we shall skip the orange groves, languishing through that day for Mr. and Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins to come and see them. We shall skip the San Francisco Exposition. We shall skip the Yosemite Valley, in which to Chester there seemed to be something lacking, and the Big Trees, which after all were much like other trees, excepting these were larger. These things the travellers saw within the scope of three weeks, and the end of those three weeks and the half of a fourth week brings them and us back to 373 Japonica Avenue. There daily Chester watched the amusement columns of the Eagle.
On a Monday evening at seven-fifteen he arrived home from the office, holding in his hand a folded copy of that dependable sheet.
“Chester,” austerely said Mrs. Pilkins as he let himself in at the door, “you are late, and you have kept everything waiting. Hurry through your dinner. We are going over to the Lewinsohns for four-handed rummy and then a rarebit.”