One morning two weeks after the summer season at Jollyland had ended Jimmy found himself in a state of moody dejection in the club car of a fast express train en route from Washington to Baltimore. He dropped into a chair in the rear end of the car and let himself slowly slide forward until his shoulder blades nearly touched the seat. He swung one leg over the other, wedged both hands into his trousers pockets and puffed viciously at the somewhat frayed cigarette which hung from one corner of his mouth.
Somehow or other his brain wasn’t functioning properly. His imagination wasn’t yielding up the customary assortment of bizarre ideas and freak suggestions from which he always was able to select one particular inspiration to serve the need of the moment. To make the situation more exasperating the last words of Meyerfield kept bobbing up in his train of thought. He could see and hear the manager of the famous “Meyerfield Frolics” as he had stood in the lobby of the New National Theatre in Washington the night before, smoking the inevitable cigar and talking in a loud booming voice.
“Remember,” Meyerfield had announced with great impressiveness, “I want you to smear us all over the front page of every paper in Baltimore. We’ve never played the ‘Frolics’ there and we’ve got to have ’em properly introduced. I’m depending upon you to plant something that will stir that town up like an earthquake. Get the girls into it some way. They’re the best card we have.”
As Jimmy slouched in his seat the memory of a hundred spectacular exploits which he had engineered swam through his mind, but he couldn’t fasten on a new idea or on anything that hadn’t been worked and re-worked. He was just beginning his first season with Meyerfield and that worthy was a showman who expected results.
A memory picture of Lolita flashed into his mind and with it came the realizing sense that her silence was perhaps responsible for his present frame of mind. Since he said good-bye to her in New York a week before to go ahead of the “Frolics” there had been only two letters from her, letters written on the first two days of their separation. In the last she had mentioned, with great enthusiasm, that she had signed a contract to play a tiny part with a road company which was to regale the theatre-goers of the small towns in the Middle West with a chaste little farce then sensationally successful in New York. It was called “Ursula’s Undies,” and it was a dainty affair designed to provoke the curiosity of that type of male who carries around a pen-holder with a little glass-eye piece at one end. You look in at his suggestion (he’s sure to ask you) and you behold a couple of large and lumpy females in one-piece bathing suits in what is alleged to be a scene suggestive of Oriental abandon. “Ursula’s Undies” wasn’t even as wicked as that, but its advertising manager distinctly sought to convey the impression that it was too terrible for words and Jimmy had been moved to remonstrate with Lolita by means of a telegram in which he had rather peremptorily directed her to throw up her job and “get into something decent.”
There had been no reply to this wire nor to a frantic series of letters which had followed it and Jimmy had begun to fancy that morning that all was lost. He turned and looked out at the endless procession of fleeting telegraph poles and at the dreary landscape apparently afloat in a shimmering haze of mist which had followed a drizzling rain. He was aroused from his reveries by a pleasant voice, a voice with something a bit “precious” in its soft cadences, a voice that betokened a rather too thick overlay of what Jimmy scornfully called “culchaw.”
“Good morning, Mr. Martin,” said the voice. “What’s the matter? You seem sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Jimmy turned and recognized the speaker, a tall young man who wore enormous tortoise shell spectacles, an impeccable two button cutaway and a smile in which there was a touch of supercilious superiority. He was one of Jimmy’s pet aversions, a highbrow press agent—J. Herbert Denby by name—who was “doing a little special literary work,” as he himself described it, ahead of a company that was presenting a repertoire of dank and morbid Scandinavian plays on tour. He had been associate editor of a literary magazine and had written a number of choice essays on what he called the “new movement in the theatre” which had been published in more or less obscure periodicals and which had been undoubtedly unread by a vast multitude of persons. He was now enjoying his first experience in the business world of the theatre and he had met Jimmy a few nights before in Washington. His abysmal ignorance of practicalities had aroused a sympathetic feeling in the latter which had been later completely dissipated by his patronizing ............