The Man With Two Left Feet

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He was a trier all right, that fellow, and had things been otherwise,
so to speak, I'd have been glad to see him win. But it was not to be.
Ah, no!

'Num-bah nineteen, you're getting all flushed. Take a rest.'

So there it was, a straight contest between me and Charlie and Mrs
Charlie and her man. Every nerve in my system was tingling with
suspense and excitement, was it not? It was not.

Charlie, as I've already hinted, was not a dancer who took much of his
attention off his feet while in action. He was there to do his
durnedest, not to inspect objects of interest by the wayside. The
correspondence college he'd attended doesn't guarantee to teach you to
do two things at once. It won't bind itself to teach you to look round
the room while you're dancing. So Charlie hadn't the least suspicion of
the state of the drama. He was breathing heavily down my neck in a
determined sort of way, with his eyes glued to the floor. All he knew
was that the competition had thinned out a bit, and the honour of
Ashley, Maine, was in his hands.

You know how the public begins to sit up and take notice when these
dance-contests have been narrowed down to two couples. There are
evenings when I quite forget myself, when I'm one of the last two left
in, and get all excited. There's a sort of hum in the air, and, as you
go round the room, people at the tables start applauding. Why, if you
didn't know about the inner workings of the thing, you'd be all of a
twitter.

It didn't take my practised ear long to discover that it wasn't me and
Charlie that the great public was cheering for. We would go round the
floor without getting a hand, and every time Mrs Charlie and her guy
got to a corner there was a noise like election night. She sure had
made a hit.

I took a look at her across the floor, and I didn't wonder. She was a
different kid from what she'd been upstairs. I never saw anybody look
so happy and pleased with herself. Her eyes were like lamps, and her
cheeks all pink, and she was going at it like a champion. I knew what
had made a hit with the people. It was the look of her. She made you
think of fresh milk and new-laid eggs and birds singing. To see her was
like getting away to the country in August. It's funny about people who
live in the city. They chuck out their chests, and talk about little
old New York being good enough for them, and there's a street in heaven
they call Broadway, and all the rest of it; but it seems to me that
what they really live for is that three weeks in the summer when they
get away into the country. I knew exactly why they were cheering so
hard for Mrs Charlie. She made them think of their holidays which were
coming along, when they would go and board at the farm and drink out of
the old oaken bucket, and call the cows by their first names.

Gee! I felt just like that myself. All day the country had been tugging
at me, and now it tugged worse than ever.

I could have smelled the new-mown hay if it wasn't that when you're in
Geisenheimer's you have to smell Geisenheimer's, because it leaves no
chance for competition.

'Keep working,' I said to Charlie. 'It looks to me as if we are going
back in the betting.'

'Uh, huh!' he says, too busy to blink.

'Do some of those fancy steps of yours. We need them in our business.'

And the way that boy worked--it was astonishing!

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy Baermann, and he wasn't
looking happy. He was nerving himself for one of those quick referee's
decisions--the sort you make and then duck under the ropes, and run
five miles, to avoid the incensed populace. It was this kind of thing
happening every now and then that prevented his job being perfect.
Mabel Francis told me that one night when Izzy declared her the winner
of the great sporting contest, it was such raw work that she thought
there'd have been a riot. It looked pretty much as if he was afraid the
same thing was going to happen now. There wasn't a doubt which of us
two couples was the one that the customers wanted to see win that
Love-r-ly Silver Cup. It was a walk-over for Mrs Charlie, and Charlie
and I were simply among those present.

But Izzy had his duty to do, and drew a salary for doing it, so he
moistened his lips, looked round to see that his strategic railways
weren't blocked, swallowed twice, and said in a husky voice:

'Num-bah ten, please re-tiah!'

I stopped at once.

'Come along,' said I to Charlie. 'That's our exit cue.'

And we walked off the floor amidst applause.

'Well,' says Charlie, taking out his handkerchief and attending to his
brow, which was like the village blacksmith's, 'we didn't do so bad,
did we? We didn't do so bad, I guess! We--'

And he looked up at the balcony, expecting to see the dear little wife,
draped over the rail, worshipping him; when, just as his eye is moving
up, it gets caught by the sight of her a whole heap lower down than he
had expected--on the floor, in fact.

She wasn't doing much in the worshipping line just at that moment. She
was too busy.

It was a regular triumphal progress for the kid. She and her partner
were doing one or two rounds now for exhibition purposes, like the
winning couple always do at Geisenheimer's, and the room was fairly
rising at them. You'd have thought from the way they were clapping that
they had been betting all their spare cash on her.

Charlie gets her well focused, then he lets his jaw drop, till he
pretty near bumped it against the floor.

'But--but--but--' he begins.

'I know,' I said. 'It begins to look as if she could dance well enough
for the city after all. It begins to look as if she had sort of put one
over on somebody, don't it? It begins to look as if it were a pity you
didn't think of dancing with her yourself.'

'I--I--I--'

'You come along and have a nice cold drink,' I said, 'and you'll soon
pick up.'

He tottered after me to a table, looking as if he had been hit by a
street-car. He had got his.

I was so busy looking after Charlie, flapping the towel and working on
him with the oxygen, that, if you'll believe me, it wasn't for quite a
time that I thought of glancing around to see how the thing had struck
Izzy Baermann.

If you can imagine a fond father whose only son has hit him with a
brick, jumped on his stomach, and then gone off with all his money, you
have a pretty good notion of how poor old Izzy looked. He was staring
at me across the room, and talking to himself and jerking his hands
about. Whether he thought he was talking to me, or whether he was
rehearsing the scene where he broke it to the boss that a mere stranger
had got away with his Love-r-ly Silver Cup, I don't know. Whichever it
was, he was being mighty eloquent.

I gave him a nod, as much as to say that it would all come right in the
future, and then I turned to Charlie again. He was beginning to pick
up.

'She won the cup!' he said in a dazed voice, looking at me as if I
could do something about it.

'You bet she did!'

'But--well, what do you know about that?'

I saw that the moment had come to put it straight to him. 'I'll tell
you what I know about it,' I said. 'If you take my advice, you'll hustle
that kid straight back to Ashley--or wherever it is that you said you
poison the natives by making up the wrong prescriptions--before she
gets New York into her system. When I was talking to her upstairs, she
was telling me about a fellow in her village who got it in the neck
just the same as you're apt to do.'

He started. 'She was telling you about Jack Tyson?'

'That was his name--Jack Tyson. He lost his wife through letting her
have too much New York. Don't you think it's funny she should have
mentioned him if she hadn't had some idea that she might act just the
same as his wife did?'

He turned quite green.

'You don't think she would do that?'

'Well, if you'd heard her--She couldn't talk of anything except this
Tyson, and what his wife did to him. She talked of it sort of sad, kind
of regretful, as if she was sorry, but felt that it had to be. I could
see she had been thinking about it a whole lot.'

Charlie stiffened in his seat, and then began to melt with pure fright.
He took up his empty glass with a shaking hand and drank a long drink
out of it. It didn't take much observation to see that he had had the
jolt he wanted, and was going to be a whole heap less jaunty and
metropolitan from now on. In fact, the way he looked, I should say he
had finished with metropolitan jauntiness for the rest of his life.

'I'll take her home tomorrow,' he said. 'But--will she come?'

'That's up to you. If you can persuade her--Here she is now. I should
start at once.'

Mrs Charlie, carrying the cup, came to the table. I was wondering what
would be the first thing she would say. If it had been Charlie, of
course he'd have said, 'This is the life!' but I looked for something
snappier from her. If I had been in her place there were at least ten
things I could have thought of to say, each nastier than the other.

She sat down and put the cup on the table. Then she gave the cup a long
look. Then she drew a deep breath. Then she looked at Charlie.

'Oh, Charlie, dear,' she said, 'I do wish I'd been dancing with you!'

Well, I'm not sure that that wasn't just as good as anything I would
have said. Charlie got right off the mark. After what I had told him,
he wasn't wasting any time.

'Darling,' he said, humbly, 'you're a wonder! What will they say about
this at home?' He did pause here for a moment, for it took nerve to say
it; but then he went right on. 'Mary, how would it be if we went home
right away--first train tomorrow, and showed it to them?'

'Oh, Charlie!' she said.

His face lit up as if somebody had pulled a switch.

'You will? You don't want to stop on? You aren't wild about New York?'

'If there was a train,' she said, 'I'd start tonight. But I thought you
loved the city so, Charlie?'

He gave a kind of shiver. 'I never want to see it again in my life!' he
said.

'You'll excuse me,' I said, getting up, 'I think there's a friend of
mine wants to speak to me.'

And I crossed over to where Izzy had been standing for the last five
minutes, making signals to me with his eyebrows.

You couldn't have called Izzy coherent at first. He certainly had
trouble with his vocal chords, poor fellow. There was one of those
African explorer men used to come to Geisenheimer's a lot when he was
home from roaming the trackless desert, and he used to tell me about
tribes he had met who didn't use real words at all, but talked to one
another in clicks and gurgles. He imitated some of their chatter one
night to amuse me, and, believe me, Izzy Baermann started talking the
same language now. Only he didn't do it to amuse me.

He was like one of those gramophone records when it's getting into its
stride.

'Be calm, Isadore,' I said. 'Something is troubling you. Tell me all
about it.'

He clicked some more, and then he got it out.

'Say, are you crazy? What did you do it for? Didn't I tell you as plain
as I could; didn't I say it twenty times, when you came for the
tickets, that yours was thirty-six?'

'Didn't you say my friend's was thirty-six?'

'Are you deaf? I said hers was ten.'

'Then,' I said handsomely, 'say no more. The mistake was mine. It
begins to look as if I must have got them mixed.'

He did a few Swedish exercises.

'Say no more? That's good! That's great! You've got nerve. I'll say
that.'

'It was a lucky mistake, Izzy. It saved your life. The people would
have lynched you if you had given me the cup. They were solid for her.'

'What's the boss going to say when I tell him?'

'Never mind what the boss will say. Haven't you any romance in your
system, Izzy? Look at those two sitting there with their heads
together. Isn't it worth a silver cup to have made them happy for life?
They are on their honeymoon, Isadore. Tell the boss exactly how it
happened, and say that I thought it was up to Geisenheimer's to give
them a wedding-present.'

He clicked for a spell.

'Ah!' he said. 'Ah! now you've done it! Now you've given yourself away!
You did it on purpose. You mixed those tickets on purpose. I thought as
much. Say, who do you think you are, doing this sort of thing? Don't
you know that professional dancers are three for ten cents? I could go
out right now and whistle, and get a dozen girls for your job. The
boss'll sack you just one minute after I tell him.'

'No, he won't, Izzy, because I'm going to resign.'

'You'd better!'

'That's what I think. I'm sick of this place, Izzy. I'm sick of
dancing. I'm sick of New York. I'm sick of everything. I'm going back
to the country. I thought I had got the pigs and chickens clear out of
my system, but I hadn't. I've suspected it for a long, long time, and
tonight I know it. Tell the boss, with my love, that I'm sorry, but it
had to be done. And if he wants to talk back, he must do it by letter:
Mrs John Tyson, Rodney, Maine, is the address.'

THE MAKING OF MAC'S

Mac's Restaurant--nobody calls it MacFarland's--is a mystery. It is off
the beaten track. It is not smart. It does not advertise. It provides
nothing nearer to an orchestra than a solitary piano, yet, with all
these things against it, it is a success. In theatrical circles
especially it holds a position which might turn the white lights of
many a supper-palace green with envy.

This is mysterious. You do not expect Soho to compete with and even
eclipse Piccadilly in this way. And when Soho does so compete, there is
generally romance of some kind somewhere in the background.

Somebody happened to mention to me casually that Henry, the old waiter,
had been at Mac's since its foundation.

'Me?' said Henry, questioned during a slack spell in the afternoon.
'Rather!'

'Then can you tell me what it was that first gave the place the impetus
which started it on its upward course? What causes should you say were
responsible for its phenomenal prosperity? What--'

'What gave it a leg-up? Is that what you're trying to get at?'

'Exactly. What gave it a leg-up? Can you tell me?'

'Me?' said Henry. 'Rather!'

And he told me this chapter from the unwritten history of the London
whose day begins when Nature's finishes.

* * * * *

Old Mr MacFarland (_said Henry_) started the place fifteen years
ago. He was a widower with one son and what you might call half a
daughter. That's to say, he had adopted her. Katie was her name, and
she was the child of a dead friend of his. The son's name was Andy. A
little freckled nipper he was when I first knew him--one of those
silent kids that don't say much and have as much obstinacy in them as
if they were mules. Many's the time, in them days, I've clumped him on
the head and told him to do something; and he didn't run yelling to his
pa, same as most kids would have done, but just said nothing and went
on not doing whatever it was I had told him to do. That was the sort of
disposition Andy had, and it grew on him. Why, when he came back from
Oxford College the time the old man sent for him--what I'm going to
tell you about soon--he had a jaw on him like the ram of a battleship.
Katie was the kid for my money. I liked Katie. We all liked Katie.

Old MacFarland started out with two big advantages. One was Jules, and
the other was me. Jules came from Paris, and he was the greatest cook
you ever seen. And me--well, I was just come from ten years as waiter
at the Guelph, and I won't conceal it from you that I gave the place a
tone. I gave Soho something to think about over its chop, believe me.
It was a come-down in the world for me, maybe, after the Guelph, but
what I said to myself was that, when you get a tip in Soho, it may be
only tuppence, but you keep it; whereas at the Guelph about ninety-nine
hundredths of it goes to helping to maintain some blooming head waiter
in the style to which he has been accustomed. It was through my kind of
harping on that fact that me and the Guelph parted company. The head
waiter complained to the management the day I called him a fat-headed
vampire.

Well, what with me and what with Jules, MacFarland's--it wasn't Mac's
in them days--began to get a move on. Old MacFarland, who knew a good
man when he saw one and always treated me more like a brother than
anything else, used to say to me, 'Henry, if this keeps up, I'll be
able to send the boy to Oxford College'; until one day he changed it
to, 'Henry, I'm going to send the boy to Oxford College'; and next
year, sure enough, off he went.

Katie was sixteen then, and she had just been given the cashier job, as
a treat. She wanted to do something to help the old man, so he put her
on a high chair behind a wire cage with a hole in it, and she gave the
customers their change. And let me tell you, mister, that a man that
wasn't satisfied after he'd had me serve him a dinner cooked by Jules
and then had a chat with Katie through the wire cage would have groused
at Paradise. For she was pretty, was Katie, and getting prettier every
day. I spoke to the boss about it. I said it was putting temptation in
the girl's way to set her up there right in the public eye, as it were.
And he told me to hop it. So I hopped it.

Katie was wild about dancing. Nobody knew it till later, but all this
while, it turned out, she was attending regular one of them schools.
That was where she went to in the afternoons, when we all thought she
was visiting girl friends. It all come out after, but she fooled us
then. Girls are like monkeys when it comes to artfulness. She called me
Uncle Bill, because she said the name Henry always reminded her of cold
mutton. If it had been young Andy that had said it I'd have clumped him
one; but he never said anything like that. Come to think of it, he
never said anything much at all. He just thought a heap without opening
his face.

So young Andy went off to college, and I said to him, 'Now then, you
young devil, you be a credit to us, or I'll fetch you a clip when you
come home.' And Katie said, 'Oh, Andy, I _shall_ miss you.' And
Andy didn't say nothing to me, and he didn't say nothing to Katie, but
he gave her a look, and later in the day I found her crying, and she
said she'd got toothache, and I went round the corner to the chemist's
and brought her something for it.

It was in the middle of Andy's second year at college that the old man
had the stroke which put him out of business. He went down under it as
if he'd been hit with an axe, and the doctor tells him he'll never be
able to leave his bed again.

So they sent for Andy, and he quit his college, and come back to London
to look after the restaurant.

I was sorry for the kid. I told him so in a fatherly kind of way. And
he just looked at me and says, 'Thanks very much, Henry.'

'What must be must be,' I says. 'Maybe, it's all for the best. Maybe
it's better you're here than in among all those young devils in your
Oxford school what might be leading you astray.'

'If you would think less of me and more of your work, Henry,' he says,
'perhaps that gentleman over there wouldn't have to shout sixteen times
for the waiter.'

Which, on looking into it, I found to be the case, and he went away
without giving me no tip, which shows what you lose in a hard world by
being sympathetic.

I'm bound to say that young Andy showed us all jolly quick that he
hadn't come home just to be an ornament about the place. There was
exactly one boss in the restaurant, and it was him. It come a little
hard at first to have to be respectful to a kid whose head you had
spent many a happy hour clumping for his own good in the past; but he
pretty soon showed me I could do it if I tried, and I done it. As for
Jules and the two young fellers that had been taken on to help me owing
to increase of business, they would jump through hoops and roll over if
he just looked at them. He was a boy who liked his own way, was Andy,
and, believe me, at MacFarland's Restaurant he got it.

And then, when things had settled down into a steady jog, Katie took
the bit in her teeth.

She done it quite quiet and unexpected one afternoon when there was
only me and her and Andy in the place. And I don't think either of them
knew I was there, for I was taking an easy on a chair at the back,
reading an evening paper.

She said, kind of quiet, 'Oh, Andy.'

'Yes, darling,' he said.

And that was the first I knew that there was anything between them.

'Andy, I've something to tell you.'

'What is it?'

She kind of hesitated.

'Andy, dear, I shan't be able to help any more in the restaurant.'

He looked at her, sort of surprised.

'What do you mean?'

'I'm--I'm going on the stage.'

I put down my paper. What do you mean? Did I listen? Of course I
listened. What do you take me for?

From where I sat I could see young Andy's face, and I didn't need any
more to tell me there was going to be trouble. That jaw of his was
right out. I forgot to tell you that the old man had died, poor old
feller, maybe six months before, so that now Andy was the real boss
instead of just acting boss; and what's more, in the nature of things,
he was, in a manner of speaking, Katie's guardian, with power to tell
her what she could do and what she couldn't. And I felt that Katie
wasn't going to have any smooth passage with this stage business which
she was giving him. Andy didn't hold with the stage--not with any girl
he was fond of being on it anyway. And when Andy didn't like a thing he
said so.

He said so now.

'You aren't going to do anything of the sort.'

'Don't be horrid about it, Andy dear. I've got a big chance. Why should
you be horrid about it?'

'I'm not going to argue about it. You don't go.'

'But it's such a big chance. And I've been working for it for years.'

'How do you mean working for it?'

And then it came out about this dancing-school she'd been attending
regular.

When she'd finished telling him about it, he just shoved out his jaw
another inch.

'You aren't going on the stage.'

'But it's such a chance. I saw Mr Mandelbaum yesterday, and he saw me
dance, and he was very pleased, and said he would give me a solo dance
to do in this new piece he's putting on.'

'You aren't going on the stage.'

What I always say is, you can't beat tact. If you're smooth and tactful
you can get folks to do anything you want; but if you just shove your
jaw out at them, and order them about, why, then they get their backs
up and sauce you. I knew Katie well enough to know that she would do
anything for Andy, if he asked her properly; but she wasn't going to
stand this sort of thing. But you couldn't drive that into the head of
a feller like young Andy with a steam-hammer.

She flared up, quick, as if she couldn't hold herself in no longer.

'I certainly am,' she said.

'You know what it means?'

'What does it mean?'

'The end of--everything.'

She kind of blinked as if he'd hit her, then she chucks her chin up.

'Very well,' she says. 'Good-bye.'

'Good-bye,' says Andy, the pig-headed young mule; and she walks out one
way and he walks out another.

* * * * *

I don't follow the drama much as a general rule, but seeing that it was
now, so to speak, in the family, I did keep an eye open for the
newspaper notices of 'The Rose Girl', which was the name of the piece
which Mr Mandelbaum was letting Katie do a solo dance in; and while
some of them cussed the play considerable, they all gave Katie a nice
word. One feller said that she was like cold water on the morning
after, which is high praise coming from a newspaper man.

There wasn't a doubt about it. She was a success. You see, she was
something new, and London always sits up and takes notice when you give
it that.

There were pictures of her in the papers, and one evening paper had a
piece about 'How I Preserve My Youth' signed by her. I cut it out and
showed it to Andy.

He gave it a look. Then he gave me a look, and I didn't like his eye.

'Well?' he says.

'Pardon,' I says.

'What about it?' he says.

'I don't know,' I says.

'Get back to your work,' he says.

So I got back.

It was that same night that the queer thing happened.

We didn't do much in the supper line at MacFarland's as a rule in them
days, but we kept open, of course, in case Soho should take it into its
head to treat itself to a welsh rabbit before going to bed; so all
hands was on deck, ready for the call if it should come, at half past
eleven that night; but we weren't what you might term sanguine.

Well, just on the half-hour, up drives a taxicab, and in comes a party
of four. There was a nut, another nut, a girl, and another girl. And
the second girl was Katie.

'Hallo, Uncle Bill!' she says.

'Good evening, madam,' I says dignified, being on duty.

'Oh, stop it, Uncle Bill,' she says. 'Say "Hallo!" to a pal, and smile
prettily, or I'll tell them about the time you went to the White City.'

Well, there's some bygones that are best left bygones, and the night at
the White City what she was alluding to was one of them. I still
maintain, as I always shall maintain, that the constable had no right
to--but, there, it's a story that wouldn't interest you. And, anyway,
I was glad to see Katie again, so I give her a smile.

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