Cheerful - By Request | Page 4

would save somebody from something before the afternoon was over.
In was inevitable that as Josie grew older she should take part in
home-talent plays. It was one of these tinsel affairs that had made clear
to her just where her future lay. The Wapello Daily Courier helped her
in her decision. She had taken the part of a gipsy queen, appropriately
costumed in slightly soiled white satin slippers with four-inch heels,
and a white satin dress enhanced by a red sash, a black velvet bolero,
and large hoop earrings. She had danced and sung with a pert

confidence, and the Courier had pronounced her talents not amateur,
but professional, and had advised the managers (who, no doubt, read
the Wapello Courier daily, along with their _Morning Telegraph_) to
seek her out, and speedily.
Josie didn't wait for them to take the hint. She sought them out instead.
There followed seven tawdry, hard-working, heartbreaking years. Supe,
walk-on, stock, musical comedy--Josie went through them all. If any
illusions about the stage had survived her Wapello days, they would
have vanished in the first six months of her dramatic career. By the
time she was twenty-four she had acquired the wisdom of fifty, a
near-seal coat, a turquoise ring with a number of smoky-looking
crushed diamonds surrounding it, and a reputation for wit and for
decency. The last had cost the most.
During all these years of cheap theatrical boarding houses (the most
soul-searing cheapness in the world), of one-night stands, of insult,
disappointment, rebuff, and something that often came perilously near
to want, Josie Fifer managed to retain a certain humorous outlook on
life. There was something whimsical about it. She could even see a
joke on herself. When she first signed her name José Fyfer, for example,
she did it with, an appreciative giggle and a glint in her eye as she
formed the accent mark over the e.
"They'll never stop me now," she said. "I'm made. But I wish I knew if
that J was pronounced like H, in humbug. Are there any Spanish
blondes?"
It used to be the habit of the other women in the company to say to her:
"Jo, I'm blue as the devil to-day. Come on, give us a laugh."
She always obliged.
And then came a Sunday afternoon in late August when her laugh
broke off short in the middle, and was forever after a stunted thing.
She was playing Atlantic City in a second-rate musical show. She had
never seen the ocean before, and she viewed it now with an

appreciation that still had in it something of a Wapello freshness.
They all planned to go in bathing that hot August afternoon after
rehearsal. Josie had seen pictures of the beauteous bathing girl dashing
into the foaming breakers. She ran across the stretch of glistening beach,
paused and struck a pose, one toe pointed waterward, her arms
extended affectedly.
"So!" she said mincingly. "So this is Paris!"
It was a new line in those days, and they all laughed, as she had meant
they should. So she leaped into the water with bounds and shouts and
much waving of white arms. A great floating derelict of a log struck her
leg with its full weight, and with all the tremendous force of the breaker
behind it. She doubled up ridiculously, and went down like a shot.
Those on the beach laughed again. When she came up, and they saw
her distorted face they stopped laughing, and fished her out. Her leg
was broken in two places, and mashed in a dozen.
José Fyfer's dramatic career was over. (This is not the cheery portion of
the story.)
When she came out of the hospital, three months later, she did very
well indeed with her crutches. But the merry-eyed woman had
vanished--she of the Wapello colouring that had persisted during all
these years. In her place limped a wan, shrunken, tragic little figure
whose humour had soured to a caustic wit. The near-seal coat and the
turquoise-and-crushed-diamond ring had vanished too.
During those agonized months she had received from the others in the
company such kindness and generosity as only stage folk can
show--flowers, candy, dainties, magazines, sent by every one from the
prima donna to the call boy. Then the show left town. There came a
few letters of kind inquiry, then an occasional post card, signed by half
a dozen members of the company. Then these ceased. Josie Fifer, in her
cast and splints and bandages and pain, dragged out long hospital days
and interminable hospital nights. She took a dreary pleasure in
following the tour of her erstwhile company via the pages of the

theatrical magazines.
"They're playing Detroit this week," she would announce to the aloof
and spectacled nurse. Or: "One-night stands,