Nine hundred of these will have attained their fulness of fame when they shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure in a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud commentary: “That’s me.”
Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis XIV court costumes, shall welcome the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words, turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.
Ten, in tiny lace caps, shall dust Ibsen furniture for six minutes after the rising of the curtain.
Nine shall attain the circuits, besieging with muscle, skill, eye, hand, voice, wit, brain, heel and toe the ultimate high walls of stardom.
One shall inherit Broadway. Sic venit gloria mundi.
Cliff McGowan and Mac McGowan were cousins. They lived on the West Side and were talented. Singing, dancing, imitations, trick bicycle riding, boxing, German and Irish dialect comedy, and a little sleight-of-hand and balancing of wheat straws and wheelbarrows on the ends of their chins came as easy to them as it is for you to fix your rat so it won’t show or to dodge a creditor through the swinging-doors of a well-lighted café—according as you may belong to the one or the other division of the greatest prestidigitators—the people. They were slim, pale, consummately self-possessed youths, whose fingernails were always irreproachably (and clothes seams reproachfully) shiny. Their conversation was in sentences so short that they made Kipling’s seem as long as court citations.
Having the temperament, they did no work. Any afternoon you could find them on Eighth Avenue either in front of Spinelli’s barber shop, Mike Dugan’s place, or the Limerick Hotel, rubbing their forefinger nails with dingy silk handkerchiefs. At any time, if you had happened to be standing, undecisive, near a pool-table, and Cliff and Mac had, casually, as it were, drawn near, mentioning something disinterestedly, about a game, well, indeed, would it have been for you had you gone your way, unresponsive. Which assertion, carefully considered, is a study in tense, punctuation, and advice to strangers.
Of all kinships it is likely that the closest is that of cousin. Between cousins there exist the ties of race, name, and favor—ties thicker than water, and yet not coagulated with the jealous precipitations of brotherhood or the enjoining obligations of the matrimonial yoke. You can bestow upon a cousin almost the interest and affection that you would give to a stranger; you need not feel toward him the contempt and embarrassment that you have for one of your father’s sons—it is the closer clan-feeling that sometimes makes the branch of a tree stronger than its trunk.
Thus were the two McGowans bonded. They enjoyed a quiet celebrity in their district, which was a strip west of Eighth Avenue with the Pump for its pivot. Their talents were praised in a hundred “joints”; their friendship was famed even in a neighborhood where men had been known to fight off the wives of their friends—when domestic onslaught was being made upon their friends by the wives of their friends. (Thus do the limitations of English force us to repetends.)
So, side by side, grim, sallow, lowering, inseparable, undefeated, the cousins fought their way into the temple of Art—art with a big A, which causes to intervene a lesson in geometry.