“Why don’t you take a flier on your own?” He asked. “Everybody in the business would wish you well.”
“What would I use for money?” he inquired sarcastically. “Playwrights ain’t takin’ good wishes for advance royalties and you can’t slip a few kind words into the salary envelopes on Saturday night.”
“But it don’t take so much to make a start,” persisted the other. “Don’t you manage to save anything at all?”
“Sure. I’ve got almost enough cigarette coupons to get a gold plated safety razor or a genuine silk umbrella, and there’s 20 shares of Flying Frog copper stock in the tray of my trunk. That must be worth all of a dollar and eight cents, and it cost me about thirty dollars, too. Quit your kiddin’, old man. An agent has about as much chance these days of savin’ money as the Kaiser has of bein’ invited to a week-end party by the King of England.”
Jimmy stood up and began to pace slowly up and down the room. The wistful look came into his eyes again and the longing smile touched his mouth once more.
“Still,” he said, half to himself, “it’s kind of nice to think about ownin’ your own show even if you know you never will, and to sort of get a flash in your mind’s eye of a twenty-four sheet with ‘James T. Martin presents’ splashed across the top of it in black on yellow with red initials. ‘James T. Martin presents’—that’d certainly look immense on that low board on Broadway near Forty-fifth street that hits everybody on the big street right in the eye.”
Matthews, in response to a summons from the box-office, left him still soliloquizing under his breath and gazing pensively across the snow covered Common.
“The Ganges Princess” was the dramatic sensation of a decade. It had been running for a solid year at the huge Hendrik Hudson Theatre in New York, having weathered a hot summer with hardly a noticeable falling off of receipts. It was Chester Bartlett’s first venture into what is technically known as the “legitimate field” and he had staged it with that lavish disregard for expense and with that keen sense of the artistic which had given him pre-eminence as a producer of light musical entertainment.
Written by one of America’s most flamboyant playwrights it told a turgid story of Oriental passion and treachery set against a spectacular background depicting scenes in ancient India. As sheer spectacle it quite transcended anything hitherto attempted in the United States. It presented a series of settings which were so flaming in their color, so permeated with the mystery of the East and so splendid in their suggestion of great size and vast distances that each new revelation was invariably greeted with gasps of amazement from the audience. A cast bristling with distinguished names gave verisimilitude to the somewhat bombastic dialogue and purely incidental members of the company included a troupe of fifty real nautch-girls, six elephants, five camels and a flock of sheep.