Pipefuls | Page 7

always be
noted in the barber shops. The small-town barber knows his customers
and when a strange face appears to be shaved on the afternoon when
the bills are announcing a play, he puts two and two together. "Are you
with that show?" he asks; and being answered in the affirmative (one
naturally would not admit that one is merely there in the frugal capacity
of co-author, and hopes that he will imagine that such a face might
conceivably belong to the low comedian) he proceeds to expound the
favourite doctrine that this is a wise burg. "Yes," he says, "folks here
are pretty cagy. If your show can get by here you needn't worry about
New York. Believe me, if you get a hand here you can go right down to
Broadway. I always take in the shows, and I've heard lots of actors say
this town is harder to please than any place they ever played."
One gets a new viewpoint on many matters by a week of one-night
stands. Theatrical billboards, for instance. We had always thought, in a
vague kind of way, that they were a defacement to a town and cluttered
up blank spaces in an unseemly way. But when you are trouping, the
first thing you do, after registering at the hotel, is to go out and scout

round the town yearning for billboards and complaining because there
aren't enough of them. You meet another member of the company on
the same errand and say, "I don't see much paper out," this being the
technical phrase. You both agree that the advance agent must be loafing.
Then you set out to see what opposition you are playing against, and
emit groans on learning that "The Million Dollar Doll in Paris" is also
in town, or "Harry Bulger's Girly Show" will be there the following
evening, or Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties in Person. "That's the kind
of stuff they fall for," said the other author mournfully, and you hustle
around to the box office to see whether the ticket rack is still full of
unsold pasteboard.
At this time of year, when all the metropolitan theatres are crowded and
there are some thirty plays cruising round in the offing waiting for a
chance to get into New York and praying that some show now there
will "flop," one crosses the trail of many other wandering troupes that
are battering about from town to town. In remote Johnstown, N. Y.,
which can only be reached by trolley and where there is no hotel (but a
very fine large theatre) one finds that Miss Grace George is to be the
next attraction. On the train to Saratoga one rides on the same train
with the Million Dollar Doll, and those who have seen her "paper" on
the billboards in Newburgh or Poughkeepsie keep an attentive optic
open for the lady herself to see how nearly she lives up to her
lithographs. And if the passerby should see a lighted window in the
hotel glimmering at two in the morning, he will probably aver that
there are some of those light-hearted "show people" carousing over a
flagon of Virginia Dare. Little does he suspect that long after the
tranquil thespians have gone to their well-earned hay, the miserable
authors of the trying-out piece may be vigiling together, trying to dope
out a new scene for the third act. The saying is not new, but it comes
frequently to the lips of the one-night stander--It's a great life if you
don't weaken.

THE OWL TRAIN
[Illustration]

Across the cold moonlit landscapes, while good folk are at home
curling their toes in the warm bottom of the bed, the Owl trains rumble
with a gentle drone, neither fast nor slow.
There are several Owl trains with which we have been familiar. One,
rather aristocratic of its kind, is the caravan of sleeping cars that leaves
New York at midnight and deposits hustling business men of the most
aggressive type at the South Station, Boston. After a dissolute progress
full of incredible jerks and jolts these pilgrims reach this dampest,
darkest, and most Arctic of all terminals about the time the morning
codfish begins to warm his bosom on the gridirons of the sacred city.
Another, a terrible nocturnal prowler, slips darkly away from Albany
about 1 A. M., and rambles disconsolately and with shrill wailings
along the West Shore line. Below the grim Palisades of the Hudson it
wakes painful echoes. Its first six units, as far as one can see in the dark,
are blind express cars, containing milk cans and coffins. We once
boarded it at Kingston, and after uneasy slumber across two facing
seats found ourself impaled upon Weehawken three hours later. There
one treads dubiously upon a