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Page 73
So, side by side, grim, sallow, lowering, inseparable, undefeated, the
cousins fought their way into the temple of Art--art with a big A, which
causes to intervene a lesson in geometry.
One night at about eleven o'clock Del Delano dropped into Mike's place
on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the
cafe became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to
mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually
strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or Mr. Shaw, of England,
had accepted an invitation to read selections from "Rena, the Snow-bird"
at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O'Connor at
Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will
have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West
Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the
place.
Del Delano could not make his feet behave; and so the world paid him
$300 a week to see them misconduct themselves on the vaudeville stage.
To make the matter plain to you (and to swell the number of words), he
was the best fancy dancer on any of the circuits between Ottawa and
Corpus Christi. With his eyes fixed on vacancy and his feet apparently
fixed on nothing, he "nightly charmed thousands," as his press-agent
incorrectly stated. Even taking night performance and matinee together,
he scarcely could have charmed more than eighteen hundred, including
those who left after Zora, the Nautch girl, had squeezed herself through
a hoop twelve inches in diameter, and those who were waiting for the
moving pictures.
But Del Delano was the West Side's favorite; and nowhere is there a more
loyal Side. Five years before our story was submitted to the editors,
Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue basement like a lean rat and had
bitten his way into the Big Cheese. Patched, half-starved, cuffless, and
as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced his
way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes on
Amateur Night at Creary's (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue. A
bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat
in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pick-up among the
amateurs. After a snore, a glass of beer from the handsome waiter, and a
temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde in
Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a
three-weeks' trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit
covering the three Washingtons--Heights, Statue, and Square.
By the time this story was read and accepted, Del Delano was drawing his
three-hundred dollars a week, which, divided by seven (Sunday acts not
in costume being permissible), dispels the delusion entertained by most
of us that we have seen better days. You can easily imagine the
worshipful agitation of Eighth Avenue whenever Del Delano honored it
with a visit after his terpsichorean act in a historically great and
vilely ventilated Broadway theatre. If the West Side could claim
forty-two minutes out of his forty-two weeks' bookings every year, it
was an occasion for bonfires and repainting of the Pump. And now you
know why Mike's saloon is a Resort, and no longer a simple Place.
Del Delano entered Mike's alone. So nearly concealed in a fur-lined
overcoat and a derby two sizes too large for him was Prince Lightfoot
that you saw of his face only his pale, hatchet-edged features and a
pair of unwinking, cold, light blue eyes. Nearly every man lounging at
Mike's bar recognized the renowned product of the West Side. To those
who did not, wisdom was conveyed by prodding elbows and growls of
one-sided introduction.
Upon Charley, one of the bartenders, both fame and fortune descended
simultaneously. He had once been honored by shaking hands with the great
Delano at a Seventh Avenue boxing bout. So with lungs of brass he now
cried: "Hallo, Del, old man; what'll it be?"
Mike, the proprietor, who was cranking the cash register, heard. On the
next day he raised Charley's wages five a week.
Del Delano drank a pony beer, paying for it carelessly out of his
nightly earnings of $42.85 and 5/7c. He nodded amiably but coldly at the
long line of Mike's patrons and strolled past then into the rear room of
the cafe. For he heard in there sounds pertaining to his own art--the
light, stirring staccato of a buck-and-wing dance.
In the back room Mac McGowan was giving a private exhibition of the
genius of his feet. A few young men sat at tables looking on critically
while they amused themselves seriously with beer. They nodded approval
at some new fancy steps of Mac's own invention.
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