Nobody, except perhaps the night-watchman, had ever seen this bench empty. At whatever hour of the day you happened to call, you would always find three wistful individuals seated side by side with their eyes on the tiny ante-room where sat the office-boy, the telephone-girl, and Mr Goble’s stenographer. Beyond this was the door marked “Private,” through which, as it opened to admit some careless, debonair, thousand-dollar-a-week comedian who sauntered in with a jaunty “Hello, Ike!” or some furred and scented female star, the rank and file of the profession were greeted, like Moses on Pisgah, with a fleeting glimpse of the promised land, consisting of a large desk and a section of a very fat man with spectacles and a bald head or a younger man with fair hair and a double chin.
The keynote of the mass meeting on the landing was one of determined, almost aggressive smartness. The men wore bright overcoats with bands round the waist, the women those imitation furs which to the uninitiated eye appear so much more expensive than the real thing. Everybody looked very dashing and very young, except about the eyes. Most of the eyes that glanced at Jill were weary. The women were nearly all blondes, blondness having been decided upon in the theatre as the color that brings the best results. The men were all so much alike that they seemed to be members of one large family,—an illusion which was heightened by the scraps of conversation, studded with “dears,” “old mans,” and “honeys,” which came to Jill’s ears. A stern fight for supremacy was being waged by a score or so of lively and powerful young scents.
For a moment Jill was somewhat daunted by the spectacle, but she recovered almost immediately. The exhilarating and heady influence of New York still wrought within her. The Berserk spirit was upon her, and she remembered the stimulating words of Mr Brown, of Brown and Widgeon, the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit. “Walk straight in!” had been the burden of his inspiring address. She pushed her way through the crowd until she came to the small ante-room.
In the ante-room were the outposts, the pickets of the enemy. In one corner a girl was hammering energetically and with great speed on a typewriter: a second girl, seated at a switchboard, was having an argument with Central which was already warm and threatened to descend shortly to personalities: on a chair tilted back so that it rested against the wall, a small boy sat eating candy and reading the comic page of an evening newspaper. All three were enclosed, like zoological specimens, in a cage formed by a high counter terminating in brass bars.
Beyond these watchers on the threshold was the door marked “Private.” Through it, as Jill reached the outer defences, filtered the sound of a piano.
Those who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that the boorishness of theatrical managers’ office-boys cannot be the product of mere chance. Somewhere, in some sinister den in the criminal districts of the town, there is a school where small boys are trained for these positions, where their finer instincts are rigorously uprooted and rudeness systematically inculcated by competent professors. Of this school the candy-eating Cerberus of Messrs Goble and Cohn had been the star scholar. Quickly seeing his natural gifts, his teachers had given him special attention. When he had graduated, it had been amidst the cordial good wishes of the entire faculty. They had taught him all they knew, and they were proud of him. They felt that he would do them credit.
This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed—for like all theatrical managers’ office-boys he had a permanent cold in the head—bit his thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His ears and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven hundred and forty-three pimples.
“Woddyerwant?” enquired Ralph, coming within an ace of condensing the question into a word of one syllable.
“I want to see Mr Goble.”
“Zout!” said the Pimple King, and returned to his paper.
There will, no doubt, always be class distinctions. Sparta had her kings and her helots, King Arthur’s Round Table its knights and its scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no nation and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally superior to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to the caller who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Theatrical office-boys do not see eye to eye with Thomas. From their pinnacle they look down on the common herd, the canaille, and despise them. They coldly question their right to live.