Well, their guestroom was terribly cold; it took hours to fill the bathtub; there was no reading-lamp by the bed; three reporters called to interview Ben, two of them kittenish young girls; the breakfasts were just fruit and cereal and toast; coffee was not served at luncheon; the faucets in the washbasin were the kind that won’t run unless you keep pressing them; four important keys on the piano were stuck and people were invited in every night to hear Ben play, and the Buckley family had been augmented by a tremendous police dog, who was “just a puppy and never growled or snapped at anyone he knew,” but couldn’t seem to remember that Ben was not an utter stranger.
On the fourth awful day Ben gave out the news—news to him and to me as well as to our host and hostess—that he had lost a filling which he would not trust any but his own New York dentist to replace. We came home and we have never seen the Buckleys since. If we do see them it will be an accident. They will hardly ask us there unless we ask them here, and we won’t ask them here for fear they would ask us there. And they were honestly the most congenial people we ever met.
It was after our visit to the Craigs at Stamford that Ben originated what he calls his “emergency exit.” We had such a horrible time at the Craigs’ and such a worse time getting away that Ben swore he would pay no more visits until he could think up a graceful method of curtailing them in the event they proved unbearable.
Here is the scheme he hit on: He would write himself a telegram and sign it with the name Ziegfeld or Gene Buck or Dillingham or George M. Cohan. The telegram would say that he must return to New York at once, and it would give a reason. Then, the day we started out, he would leave it with Irene, the girl at Harms’, his publishers, with instructions to have it sent to him twenty-four hours later.
When it arrived at whatever town we were in, he would either have the host or hostess take it over the telephone or ask the telegraph company to deliver it so he could show it around. We would put on long faces and say how sorry we were, but of course business was business, so goodbye and so forth. There was never a breath of suspicion even when the telegram was ridiculous, like the one Ben had sent to himself at Spring Lake, where we were staying with the Marshalls just after Betty’s Birthday opened at the Globe. The Marshalls loved musical shows, but knew less than nothing about music and swallowed this one whole:
Shaw and Miss Miller both suffering from laryngitis Stop Entire score must be rewritten half tone lower Stop Come at once Stop.
If, miraculously, Ben had ever happened to be enjoying himself, he would, of course, have kept the contents of his message a secret or else displayed it and remarked swaggeringly that he guessed he wasn’t going to let any so-and-so theatrical producer spoil his fun.
Ben is in Atlantic City now and I have read every book in the house and am writing this just because there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. And also because we have a friend, Joe Frazier, who is a magazine editor and the other day I told him I would like to try my hand at a short story, but I was terrible at plots, and he said plots weren’t essential; look at Ernest Hemingway; most of his stories have hardly any plot; it’s his style that counts. And he—I mean Mr. Frazier—suggested that I write about our visit to Mr. and Mrs. Thayer in Lansdowne, outside of Philadelphia, which Mr. Frazier said, might be termed the visit that ended visits and which is the principal reason why I am here alone.
Well, it was a beautiful night a year ago last September. Ben was conducting the performance—“Step Lively”—and I was standing at the railing of the Boardwalk in front of the theater, watching the moonlight on the ocean. A couple whom I had noticed in the hotel dining-room stopped alongside of me and pretty soon the woman spoke to me, something about how pretty it was. Then came the old question, wasn’t I Mrs. Ben Drake? I said I was, and the woman went on:
“My name is Mrs. Thayer—Hilda Thayer. And this is my husband. We are both simply crazy about Mr. Drake’s music and just dying to meet him personally. We wondered if you and he would have supper with us after the performance tonight.”
“Oh, I’m afraid that’s impossible,” I replied. “You see when they are having a tryout, he and the librettists and the lyric writers work all night every night until they get everything in shape for the New York opening. They never have time for more than a sandwich and they eat that right in the theater.”
“Well, how about luncheon tomorrow?”
“He’ll be rehearsing all day.”
“How about dinner tomorrow evening?”
“Honestly, Mrs. Thayer, it’s out of the question. Mr. Drake never makes engagements during a tryout week.”
“And I guess he doesn’t want to meet us anyway,” put in Mr. Thayer. “What use would a genius like Ben Drake have for a couple of common-no-account admirers like Mrs. Thayer and myself! If we were ‘somebody’ too, it would be different!”
“Not at all!” said I. “Mr. Drake is perfectly human. He loves to have his music praised and I am sure he would be delighted to meet you if he weren’t so terribly busy.”
“Can you lunch with us yourself?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Any day.”
Well, whatever Ben and other husbands may think, there is no decent way of turning
