Octavus Roy Cohen

“ HE INVITED her to supper with him that night and they went to a very famous Broadway delicatessen which caters to a peculiarly picturesque midnight crowd: vaudeville artists, theatrical handy men, racetrack bookmakers and racetrack touts, chorus girls, gamblers, confidence men, with an occasional Rialto magnate and a more occasional sober-faced business man who knows instinctively that he has entered a place where he does not belong and yet does not know how to retreat. ”

“ It was Ellison's shibboleth that nothing succeeds like success and that there is no employment for the down-and-outer. He fondly believed that the world was fooled—particularly this sweet-faced girl; and he retained that delusion because he could not read the mother light in her eyes nor sense the maternal instinct beneath her forcedly impersonal exterior.
“THE job,” she went on softly, “isn't very wonderful. I have a small place here, just a little community music store. But I do need a young man with personality who can play jazz music and sing jazz lyrics. Do you think you can?” ”

“ Con was instinctively of the Rialto. He spent more than four hundred dollars for a new outfit of clothes, the first fine clothes he had ever owned. Ellen gasped when she saw him in them: they were not at all what she would have selected. They shrieked at the casual observer, they commanded attention; and a puzzled frown creased her forehead as she noticed that they became him better than quieter clothes would have done.
One night Con went alone to the famous Broadway delicatessen where he had proposed marriage to Ellen. ”

“ Familiar as she was with popular music, Ellen sincerely believed that it was the best she had ever heard. It was as good as the majority, and the fact that he had written it completed her illusion.
“You mean to say you couldn't get that published?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That's unbelievable. I never heard a better one. Why, Con! I never dreamed you could do it. You're marvelous.”
“I'll say! But they don't give a guy a chance—down yonder. Stick this number into print an' it'll sell a million copies: easy. Say! Do you really like it?” ”

“ It was not Conrad Ellison's way to be dishonest with any one except himself. He telephoned and told her frankly that he had been invited to a party with several of the country's most successful song writers and that he knew it would be good business to accept.
She caught the nuance of pleading in his voice and bade him go and have a go time. He told her that e was a darned good kid and rushed away to join the others, proclaiming loudly that he had the swellest little wife in the world—and then he promptly forgot her. ”

“ I'm an awful hit—”
She did not equivocate. “You are not to accept it.”
“What?” He sat up very straight. “Say! Ellen—”
“You are not to accept that vaudeville engagement, or any other, during the term of your contract with Exclusive.”
He laughed. “Aw! Say, Kid—ain't that stepping kind of lively? What have you got to do with—”
“Furthermore, Con”—the words were flowing a trifle more easily now—“I may as well tell you that you have published your last song under that contract. As a song writer and as a vaudeville artist you are through so long as that contract lasts.” ”

“ Now listen, Ellen—”
“I'd rather not talk of the past, Con. Suppose you run along. ...”
But he did not run along. Instead he hovered uncertainly about the doorway. A few minutes later a customer came in and asked for a certain popular number. Impulsively Con elbowed his way to the piano, flipped open the pages of the desired song, rippled his long fingers over the keyboard and sent his sweet, nasal tenor echoing through the shop. Nor did he see his wife turn suddenly away and hurry toward the little room in the rear where she might clear the mist from her eyes. ”

“ THEY moved into a little two-room-and-kitchenette apartment two blocks removed from the music store. They bought inexpensive but attractive furniture on the instalment plan. Then, for two weeks, Ellen luxuriated in home-making: the buying of little gewgaws and knickknacks here and there—a bit of imitation tapestry, a picture, two cloisonné vases (which he thought were absurd) , a piano lamp: a score and one of little things which converted the stuffy apartment into a home. It was so thrillingly different to her now—this home-making for a man, for her husband. ”

“ One day he turned away from the piano, his narrow face wreathed in disgust. “That new number is the bunk,” he derided. “Anybody could write a better one.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders. “Why don't you write a song, dear?”
“Write one? Gosh! I've written a half-dozen.”
“They must be wonderful! Why don't you publish them?”
He smiled in superior fashion as he patted her hand. “Tried. Nothing doing. Tin Pan Alley is a closed corporation. They've got men down there grinding 'em out to order. No chance for the outsider. An' my stuff's got 'em all beat. Say—like to hear one?” ”

“ SUCCESS bred success: song followed song, and each of them tickled the popular fancy. Then Con was offered one of the spot positions at a great Sunday night vaudeville concert in New York. Ellen attended, with Abe Rothstein and Abe's ponderous wife. They saw Con strut onto the stage, totally devoid of stage fright; they heard his announcement that he was the greatest popular song writer in the world and that he was about to regale them with several of his own compositions; they saw him signal his accompanist and then throw himself bodily into the syncopations of his latest sensational hit. ”

“ It just happened; had it not been Freda, it would have been some other woman. But the night that Con came to her and told her he wanted a divorce in order that he might marry Freda, Ellen knew that she had been wrong in believing that she was beyond the point of being hurt by him.
“We just don't hit it off together,” he explained awkwardly. “We ain't the same kind, that's all. I guess you've done your best—well, if you have, so have I. You needn't worry about the alimony: we'll settle all that in advance. There just ain't a bit of sense in us staying tied up to one another.” ”

“ She was sufficiently attractive to have drawn them to her had she tried, but she could not try—and would not have known what to do with them had they responded to deliberate allure on her part. Always she had known the impulse to mother a man, to feel that she was indispensable—and the jaunty, debonair self-sufficiency of the young male of her generation somewhat appalled her. ”

“ You are you, and I can't make you over: nobody can. So tomorrow I'm going to destroy that contract assignment from Mr. Rothstein. You can go ahead with your song writing, and he'll publish the numbers. You can accept all the vaudeville engagements you want—”
He was staring at her queerly.
“And the important thing, Con, is this: You want to divorce me. For some absurd reason I refused to grant the divorce. Well, I've changed my mind. You can have your freedom whenever you want.” She crossed to the window. “Now please go, Con: I'd rather we didn't talk any more this evening.” ”

“ She answered quietly, without turning. “No, Con; I'm not sore. Just hurt.”
“Oh! Hurt, is it? Well, it seems to me that when a guy has just put a big deal across his wife ought to enthuse a little. Here I come home all pepped up an' flash a big contract on you an' you run off by yourself an' say you're hurt. What right have you got to be hurt, anyway? I guess I'm the one that ought to be hurt. I guess I got a right to expect my wife to be glad I'm successful.” ”

“ Ellen, unfortunately, had no standards by which to gauge a man: she had known scores of them, but the acquaintanceships had been dully impersonal. She knew men as members of the human race who wore pants and were, as a rule, pleasant customers. ”

“ When a Calm Business Girl Marries a Jazz King, Life Is Certain to Be Speeded Up in at Least One Household
By Octavus Roy Cohen
IT WAS no cause for wonderment that Ellen Shannon should fall in love. For twenty-three years she had had the instinct and the capacity, but it so happened that until Conrad Ellison slouched into her little music store and immodestly catalogued his fitness for the position which she had to offer, she had come in contact with the male sex only in the most casual and impersonal manner.
Ellen Shannon was not beautiful; she was not, perhaps, even pretty. ”

“ The man was actually making himself believe that he was the injured person. “You're a preach, I say! I guess it don't mean anything to you that Abe Rothstein, head of Exclusive, says I'm the greatest little ol' song writer that ever jimmied his way into Tin Pan Alley. I guess that don't mean anything to you, huh?”
“Nothing special: not tonight.”
“I thought not. I guess you wanted me to be a bum always, like I was when I took that lousy job in your music joint. ”

“ In a narrow little room, Con banged out the number on the piano and sang it with all the power at his command. It was exceedingly effective and when they left the place they carried with them a check for two hundred dollars and a copy of the contract they had signed giving over to the company all mechanical rights to this particular number.
It was issued a short time later as the reverse side of a record which had taken Broadway by storm. That was a regular practice of the big companies—to put an unknown cheap number on the reverse side of a hit. ”