Cheerful - By Request | Page 6

yet they say everything works out in the end
according to some scheme or other. Well, what's the answer to this, I
wonder? I can't make it come out right. I guess one of the figures must
have got away from me."
In the second week of Sid Hahn's convalescence he heard, somehow, of
Josie Fifer. It was characteristic of him that he sent for her. She put a
chiffon scarf about the neck of her skimpy little kimono, spent an hour
and ten minutes on her hair, made up outrageously with that sublime
unconsciousness that comes from too close familiarity with rouge pad
and grease jar, and went. She was trembling as though facing a
first-night audience in a part she wasn't up on. Between the crutches,
the lameness, and the trembling she presented to Sid Hahn, as she stood
in the doorway, a picture that stabbed his kindly, sensitive heart with a
quick pang of sympathy.
He held out his hand. Josie's crept into it. At the feel of that generous
friendly clasp she stopped trembling. Said Hahn:
"My nurse tells me that you can do a bedside burlesque of 'East Lynne'
that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh.
Go on and do it for me, there's a good girl. I could use a laugh myself
just now."
And Josie Fifer caught up a couch cover for a cloak, with the scarf that
was about her neck for a veil, and, using Hahn himself as the ailing
chee-ild, gave a biting burlesque of the famous bedside visit that
brought the tears of laughter to his eyes, and the nurse flying from
down the hall. "This won't do," said that austere person.
"Won't, eh? Go on and stick your old thermometer in my mouth. What

do I care! A laugh like that is worth five degrees of temperature."
When Josie rose to leave he eyed her keenly, and pointed to the
dragging leg.
"How about that? Temporary or permanent?"
"Permanent."
"Oh, fudge! Who's telling you that? These days they can do--"
"Not with this, though. That one bone was mashed into about
twenty-nine splinters, and when it came to putting 'em together again a
couple of pieces were missing. I must've mislaid 'em somewhere.
Anyway, I make a limping exit--for life."
"Then no more stage for you--eh, my girl?"
"No more stage."
Hahn reached for a pad of paper on the table at his bedside, scrawled a
few words on it, signed it "S.H." in the fashion which became famous,
and held the paper out to her.
"When you get out of here," he said, "you come to New York, and up
to my office; see? Give 'em this at the door. I've got a job for you--if
you want it."
And that was how Josie Fifer came to take charge of the great Hahn &
Lohman storehouse. It was more than a storehouse. It was a museum. It
housed the archives of the American stage. If Hahn & Lohman prided
themselves on one thing more than on another, it was the lavish
generosity with which they invested a play, from costumes to carpets.
A period play was a period play when they presented it. You never saw
a French clock on a Dutch mantel in a Hahn & Lohman production. No
hybrid hangings marred their back drop. No matter what the play, the
firm provided its furnishings from the star's slippers to the chandeliers.
Did a play last a year or a week, at the end of its run furniture, hangings,

scenery, rugs, gowns, everything, went off in wagonloads to the already
crowded storehouse on East Forty-third Street.
Sometimes a play proved so popular that its original costumes, outworn,
had to be renewed. Sometimes the public cried "Thumbs down!" at the
opening performance, and would have none of it thereafter. That meant
that costumes sometimes reached Josie Fifer while the wounds of the
dressmaker's needle still bled in them. And whether for a week or a
year fur on a Hahn & Lohman costume was real fur; its satin was
silk-backed, its lace real lace. No paste, or tinsel, or cardboard about H.
& L.! Josie Fifer could recall the scenes in a play, step by step from
noting with her keen eye the marks left on costume after costume by
the ravages of emotion. At the end of a play's run she would hold up a
dress for critical inspection, turning it this way and that.
"This is the dress she wore in her big scene at the end of the second act
where she crawls on her knees to her wronged husband and pounds on
the door and weeps. She certainly did give it some hard wear. When
Marriott crawls she crawls, and when