Footlights

Satire

The Romance of yesterday is the Satire of to-morrow. Juliet to-day would be a lovesick flapper. We’d regard with tongue in cheek her moonings to the moon. There is such a fine line between the smile of sympathy and the smile of sophistication, that the author confesses she is still in doubt which the heroine of “Footlights” will call forth—if either.

Have you ever been in a small town, small time vaudeville house? Well, even if you have, and could live through it, you’ve probably never seen that mysterious region known as “backstage.” You’ve never heard warped boards creak under the lightest step. You’ve never stood in the wings waiting for your turn, trying to escape the draught that is everywhere, shivering but afraid to sneeze. You’ve never dodged misdirected tobacco juice. You’ve never endured the composite odors only a one time “opery-house,” sometime warehouse, another time stable, can produce. You’ve never done your three a day, rain, shine or blizzard, then rushed to catch a local with oil lamps swinging weirdly overhead and a jerky halt at every peach tree. But most of all, if you’re a woman, you’ve never known what it is to sit weeping in a pea-green walled dressing-room because you chose to do the darn thing yourself and won’t go back home and admit you’re beaten.

If any one of these experiences had been yours, you’d probably walk straight into the pea-green dressing-room referred to, pat Elizabeth Parsons on the shoulder and say, “I’m with you, old girl! It’s a black, black world. No sunshine anywhere! Never was, never will be!”

As it happened, those in her world at the moment were not of her world. They were a hardened lot, with hands ready to dig down and share a copper with a pal, with glib greeting in their own peculiar patois as they swung through the stage entrance, but inured to creaking boards, to combined odors, to oaths and tobacco juice and icy currents that gripped more sensitive shoulders like the hand of death. Life had handed them a deal that wasn’t exactly square, perhaps. Almost any of them would have been a knock-out on Broadway! But they had reached the point where emotion, as well as indignation, expressed itself in shrugs.

They could snore peacefully in a swaying day-coach, dreaming of the hour when the flower of success would spring up by the wayside. So Elizabeth Parsons wept alone. Her make-up boxes reeled in every direction as her head went down in their midst. Her hands, pressed against her lips, tried to still the sobs she knew were cowardly. Her body shook with that least beautiful of human emotions, self-pity, and she wished she were dead.

A gale of sleet and snow tore against her little alley window. It rattled the single pane furiously. It forced its way through cracks and dripped into pools of water on the stone floor. It blurred the already dull electric globes round her dressing-table with a dank mist and soaked a chill into her bones. But it had nothing whatever to do with her tears. They were the result of an accumulation of misery and loneliness, and finally the receipt of a wire from her booking agent advising her that her route had been changed. For the next three days she must play her own home town.

It was the crowning humiliation! She had endured the disappointment of all the rest of it; but to go back to the barnlike old theater in Main Street, wedged between movies and tinsel acrobats, was too much. To hear the wagging tongues and see the wagging heads of those who had warned her two years ago that New York was a pit of the devil; to let them see that even his satanic majesty had let her sink into oblivion, was more than she could bear.

From the stage at the foot of the iron stairs came a crashing chord and the voice of Jack Halloran, “The Funniest Man in the World,” singing a nasal travesty:—

“Oh, Rigoletto—give me a stiletto!”

Elizabeth raised her head, mopped away the tears, and rearranged her make-up. Her turn was next but one.

“BETTY PARSONS—FAMOUS IMITATOR OF FAMOUS STARS STRAIGHT FROM BROADWAY.”

So proclaimed the announcements that accompanied her pictures outside the theater. They always made Elizabeth smile. She had certainly come from Broadway—straight.

She brushed back her soft brown hair, pinned a towel round it, laid on a layer of grease-paint. A supply was needed to blot out traces of the last bad half hour. She beaded the lashes, penciled black shadows under them that made her gray eyes look green, and carmined her lips so that the slightly austere New England lines of them softened into luscious curves.

In the midst of transforming a primrose into an orchid, and with thoughts still fastened on the dreaded to-morrow, she did not hear the knock on her door. It was repeated. Turning, she saw a white square of paper shoved through the crack. She picked it up wonderingly. Communications from any one but her agent were almost unknown quantities.

In spite of her dread, in spite of her determination to die rather than face home folks, she dropped her powder puff, made one bound for the door, flung it wide.

“Oh, Rigoletti—give me a yard of spaghetti,” warbled Halloran from below.

With a little checked cry, Elizabeth reached out both hands. A plump, pink cheeked young man took them and somewhat diffidently stepped into the little square of room. But Elizabeth clung to him shamelessly and her voice caught when she tried to speak. He was the first link between two years of loneliness and the yesterdays of happy childhood.

“Lou,” came at last, “Lou Seabury!”

“I got a nerve, haven’t I,—walkin’ in on you like this?”

His pink face flushed a deeper pink as she pulled the chair from the dressing-table, thrust him into it, and stood looking down. “You’re just an angel from heaven, that’s what you are! How ever in the world did you find me?”

“I came over here yesterday to look at some threshin’ machines. Scott Brothers are sellin’ out and Dad got word they’re lettin’ their stuff go dirt cheap, so he sent me to take a squint. By Jiminy, I almost dropped dead when I went past the theater this afternoon and saw your picture. Maybe I didn’t go right up to the girl in the ticket box and tell her I was an old friend of yours!”

Elizabeth’s tongue went into her cheek. “And what did she say?”

“Asked why I didn’t come in to see you perform to-night and I said I would. But first I made up my mind I’d let you know I was here. Say—what is it you do?”

“Imitations.”

“Who do you imitate?”

“Oh, Ethel Barrymore and Elsie Janis and Eddie Foy and George Cohan and Nazimova—” She reeled off a list, most of them strange to him.

“I’ll bet you’re great. Gee—Lizzie—but you’re pretty.” His round face went scarlet as the words popped out and he shifted uneasily under the loose ill-fitting coat that hung from his broad shoulders.

She met his wide-eyed admiration with a smile. “It’s the paint, Lou.”

“No, sirree! You always were pretty. I used to watch you sittin’ beside me in the choir, and when you threw back your head and sort of closed your eyes to sing, I didn’t wonder Sam Goodwin was crazy about you.”

“Is he still organist at the First Presbyterian?”

“Yep.”

“And are you still in the choir?”

“Yep.” His boyish brown eyes dropped. His plump hands twisted the brim of his wide slouch hat. “Guess that’s the most I’ll ever amount to.”

“But that beautiful voice of yours—it’s a sin!”

“My Dad don’t think so. Gimcracks, he calls it. I asked him once to give me enough to get it trained,” the eyes lifted with a twinkle, “and I never asked him again.”

She patted his arm sympathetically. “He wouldn’t understand—of course.”