The Federation of the world.”
The magic cell of music — the electric piano in the shallow tiled lobby of Altamont’s favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped playing with firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment, and without warning commenced anew.
It’s a long way to Tipperary.
The world shook with the stamp of marching men.
Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C.
M. McReady, the druggist’s drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood’s pharmacy.
To-day: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.
Goggling, his great idiot’s head lolling on his scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward lunges of his crippled right foot.
The fingers of his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of vanity.
A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow shoulders.
In his lapel a huge red carnation.
His thin face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles.
For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor.
He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at him, and continued down to Wood’s where he was greeted with loud cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain’s end.
They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back and drawing him up to the fountain.
Pleased, he looked at them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy.
“What’re you having, Willie?” said Mr. Tobias Pottle.
“Give me a dope,” said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, “a dope and lime.”
Pudge Carr, the politician’s son, laughed hilariously.
“Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?” he said, and struck him heavily on the back.
His thick stupid face composed itself.
“Have a cigarette, Willie,” he said, offering the package to Willie Goff.
“What’s yours?” said the jerker to Toby Pottle.
“Give me a dope, too.”
“I don’t want anything,” said Pudge Carr.
Such drinks as made them nobly wild, not mad.
Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie’s cigarette, winking slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair, and a long dark face.
Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette, lighting it with dry smacking lips.
He coughed, removed the weed, and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it, curiously.
They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom.
Brady Chalmers took Willie’s colored handkerchief gently from his pocket and held it up for their inspection.
Then he folded it carefully and put it back.
“What are you all dressed up about, Willie?” he said.
“You must be going to see your girl.”
Willie Goff grinned cunningly.
Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils.
He was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a pink massaged face.
“Come on, Willie,” he said, blandly, quietly, “you’ve got a girl, haven’t you?”
Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall, twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge.
“I’ve got several,” said Willie Goff.
“A fellow’s got to have a little Poon–Tang, hasn’t he?”
Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully, uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set.
They called for stronger music, louder wine.
“How do you do?”
“Aha!
Aha!” said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw.
“Where were YOU that time?”
“YOU’LL never know,” she called back.
It was between them — their little secret.
They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.