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Page 72
When the returned nobleman finds that the one-talented servant has
nothing to hand over except the original fund entrusted to him, he is as
angry as a multi-millionaire would be if some one should hide under his
bed and make a noise like an assessment. He orders the unprofitable
servant cast into outer darkness, after first taking away his talent and
giving it to the one-hundred-per cent. financier, and breathing strange
saws, saying: "From him that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath." Which is the same as to say: "Nothing from nothing
leaves nothing."
And now closer draw the threads of parable, precept allegory, and
narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into
the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There
is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors trip on.
Talent: A gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or
accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the
parable in Matt. XXV. l4-30.)
In New York City to-day there are (estimated) 125,000 living creatures
training for the stage. This does not include seals, pigs, dogs,
elephants, prize-fighters, Carmens, mind-readers, or Japanese wrestlers.
The bulk of them are in the ranks of the Four Million. Out of this
number will survive a thousand.
Nine hundred of these will have attained their fulness of fame when they
shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure in
a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud
commentary: "That's me."
Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis XIV court costumes, shall welcome
the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words,
turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.
Ten, in tiny lace caps, shall dust Ibsen furniture for six minutes after
the rising of the curtain.
Nine shall attain the circuits, besieging with muscle, skill, eye, hand,
voice, wit, brain, heel and toe the ultimate high walls of stardom.
One shall inherit Broadway. Sic venit gloria mundi.
Cliff McGowan and Mac McGowan were cousins. They lived on the West Side
and were talented. Singing, dancing, imitations, trick bicycle riding,
boxing, German and Irish dialect comedy, and a little sleight-of-hand
and balancing of wheat straws and wheelbarrows on the ends of their
chins came as easy to them as it is for you to fix your rat so it won't
show or to dodge a creditor through the swinging-doors of a well-lighted
cafe--according as you may belong to the one or the other division of
the greatest prestidigitators--the people. They were slim, pale,
consummately self-possessed youths, whose fingernails were always
irreproachably (and clothes seams reproachfully) shiny. Their
conversation was in sentences so short that they made Kipling's seem as
long as court citations.
Having the temperament, they did no work. Any afternoon you could find
them on Eighth Avenue either in front of Spinelli's barber shop, Mike
Dugan's place, or the Limerick Hotel, rubbing their forefinger nails
with dingy silk handkerchiefs. At any time, if you had happened to be
standing, undecisive, near a pool-table, and Cliff and Mac had,
casually, as it were, drawn near, mentioning something disinterestedly,
about a game, well, indeed, would it have been for you had you gone your
way, unresponsive. Which assertion, carefully considered, is a study in
tense, punctuation, and advice to strangers.
Of all kinships it is likely that the closest is that of cousin. Between
cousins there exist the ties of race, name, and favor--ties thicker than
water, and yet not coagulated with the jealous precipitations of
brotherhood or the enjoining obligations of the matrimonial yoke. You
can bestow upon a cousin almost the interest and affection that you
would give to a stranger; you need not feel toward him the contempt and
embarrassment that you have for one of your father's sons--it is the
closer clan-feeling that sometimes makes the branch of a tree stronger
than its trunk.
Thus were the two McGowans bonded. They enjoyed a quiet celebrity in
their district, which was a strip west of Eighth Avenue with the Pump
for its pivot. Their talents were praised in a hundred "joints"; their
friendship was famed even in a neighborhood where men had been known to
fight off the wives of their friends--when domestic onslaught was being
made upon their friends by the wives of their friends. (Thus do the
limitations of English force us to repetends.)
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