Only a freshman

HEYWOOD BROUN

I was not yet eighteen when I met my first chorus girl. She was a friend of my brother's and the whole thing seems like yesterday. You do not need to implore me to reveal all. for that I will gladly do. As I sit here, alone, in the corner of the cafe, my friend, all I have is my absinthe and my memories. Yvette! Meggy! Mary! Dolores! and Mo! And with another drink I could do even better than that. Please do not think that Hegg) was a typographical error. She was a blonde in an Eddie Foy show and she is not to be confused with that promising young actor, O. P. Heggie. Why was she called Ileggy? That unfortunately I do not know. My memory for some things is not what it used to be. Life to me has become a sidewalk cafe and the waiters go to and fro.

But I fear I wander. You were asking me about the first young lady of the theatre I ever met. I told you. didn't I, that her name was Lottie and that she later became a famous comedienne? And I think I said she was a friend of my brother's. This was in the winter of 1907. In those days l was a dumb basketball player serving as center on the freshman team at Harvard. I had just come back from practise in the old Hemingway Gymnasium, all rosy and righteous, when my brother nailed me and said, "I want you to go into Boston and deliver a message to Lottie at the stage door of the Tremont. Tell her we've got a private dining room at the Cecil and for her to go right over and take Selma with her. Jack and I are going to be a little late.

"I've never met Lottie," I objected.

"You know her by sight." said my brother. "I pointed her out to YOU at the show, the third from the left. You can introduce yourself. Now make it snappy. I don t want her to miss the message.

The stage door of the Tremont was down a very narrow alley which took a sharp turn to the right when halfway home. The entrance to this alley was on Tremont Street, one of Boston's busiest thoroughfares. Much more readily would I have taken a message to Garcia. Thrice I walked past the entrance to the alley and did not enter. It seemed to me that all who walked in Boston that night were saying, "Look at that Harvard stage-door Johnny."

Years later I would gladly have worn such a phrase as Henry of Navarre wore his white plume, but remember I was only seventeen, a dumb basketball player, and the bearer of a message from my brother.

Finally, I steeled my will and dodged suddenly down the alley. Five other men were waiting and four of them looked like students. The fifth, and most dashing of the lot, appeared to be in trade and. judging from the suit he wore, a dealer in horse blankets. The fact that I was not wholly alone but mingling with my own kind buoyed me up only for a moment for suddenly a new fear seized upon me. How could I introduce myself to the young lady and deliver my brother s message? I didn't know her name. She was Lottie, to he sure, but one does not introduce himself to a perfect stranger by hailing her in a familiar manner. At least that is a very different sort of introduction than I planned. If I had ever heard her last name it had escaped me. This is slight deficiency in the brain has plagued me all the days of my life. Always I know that this one is Tillie and the other Ophelia but I am not a man to bandy the first names of women about in public places.

It was too late to run. Lottie was coming down the alley. In desperation I called her nothing. Instead I blocked the way and said with mounting rapidity. "I'm Irving Broun's brother. Me wants you and Selma to go right to the Cecil. The dining room's in bis name. He and Jack will be about ten minutes late.

My message delivered. I turned to run and had I done so it would have changed my whole life. For better or for worse? Who can tell? It was a silvery giggle which held me hack.

"I'm not going to hurt you. said Lottie. "You needn't run. So you re Irving Broun's younger brother. Are you in school up here?"

"I m an undergraduate at Harvard,' I answered, somewhat nettled.

"That s what I meant, explained Lottie. "I call 'em all schools—Harvard and Yale and what's that one where they all wear sweaters and break up the shows in Trenton by firing pennies at the girls?"

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"Princeton." I replied promptly.

By this time, we had reached Tremont Street proper and the scurrying Puritans could see that a stage-door Johnny was talking to a chorus girl. Lottie did look like a chorus girl. I tried to ease myself out of the compromising situation as rapidly as possible. "Good night," I said, extending my hand to indicate that there was to lie no more intimate sort of parting. I had heard that you were supposed to kiss chorus girls good-night, but I was center on the freshman basketball team. We were to play Roxbury Latin on Friday. And this was Tremont Street. Some passing undergraduate might report to the coach that I bad betrayed my alma mater for the sake of a woman's smile.

"But aren't you coming to the party?" asked Lottie.

"I can't," I said. "I'm in training," and forthwith I tipped my hat and dashed across the Common.

I was to see Lottie only once more and that meeting lacked, perhaps, some of the significance of this episode when, for the first time, a chorus girl spoke to me. Indeed we had shaken hands and, psychologically, that was as upsetting to me as if that brief handclasp constituted a common law marriage. And she had asked, "Aren't you coming to the party?" I had some thought of turning back but that idea was thrust aside. I would be loyal to Harvard, the basketball team, and my brother. Still for the rest of the month those words rang in my ear. "Aren't you coming to the party?" It was as if I had been tapped by the great god Pan. Only a little while before I had been a small boy, collecting cigarette pictures of Lillian Russell in tights. Now I was a man. I had talked to a chorus girl. Not very much, to be sure, but even in later years I never mastered the art. It took me years to learn that chorus girls are quite capable of doing the talking themselves. It is only necessary to listen.

Perhaps my second meeting with Lottie may seem an anti-climax, but if you are interested, my friend, I think it may be well to round out the episode. I could sit like this for hours and tell you of my adventures. Excuse the egotism of an old man but I, who cannot for the life of me carry a tune or distinguish California claret from vintage burgundy, have nevertheless played my part in the world of wine, women, and song. Like the perfume of mignonette, those days come back to me when all the world was young and I was known as Brummel Broun.

Where was I? Oh, yes, we were about to have supper in a private dining room at the Hotel Cecil. Please do not associate any sinister significance with that phrase "private dining room." It was merely a convenience to dodge the curious liquor laws of Boston. According to the ordinance nothing could be sold after midnight and so it was the custom of the hotel, in its private dining rooms, to place upon a side table an assortment of everything that might be desired. The fiction was that the customer had ordered all this great store of wines and liquors in advance. As a matter of fact, you paid only for what you consumed and my tipple was sloe gin.

Not until many years later did I learn how to spell that name. It was my notion that the beverage was "slow gin" and that its properties were all that the name implied. This was a drink which might sneak up on you, but it would not make a sudden and impetuous attack and steal away the brain. Maddened with liquor, men have been known to do desperate and immoral things. And so I drank my slow gin judiciously and every other round I took a beer.

At my first party with ladies from the theatre there were present my brother Irving, his friend Jack Sullivan, Lottie and a girl named Mae. Mae came with Jack. Irving was with Lottie and I came by myself. The spirit of romance was gravely injured for everybody early in the evening. The fault lay with Jack Sullivan. He put too great a burden upon the imagination of Mae. We had barely been seated and the chicken a la king had not been served. The mood was wrong.

"Mae," said Jack Sullivan, "if I was sitting right here where I am, with you next to me, and on the other side there was a million dollars and you couldn't have both which would you choose—me or the million dollars?"

"I'd take the million dollars," said Mae.

Now. of course, Mac was partly in the wrong. Jack shouldn't have begun asking hypothetical questions so early in the evening, but she shouldn't have given him such a heartless answer. After all, it wasn't a serious proposition. There wasn't any million dollars. Lottie tried hard to get the party back into a sweeter and more friendly spirit. She didn't want me at my first supper to get the notion that actresses were wholly mercenary. And that, I suppose, explains what happened later as we were leaving. Don't think me a cad, I beg of you. All this was so long ago. Irving and Mae and Jack had started down the hall and for just a second Lottie and I were alone. I stood aside to let her pass and suddenly she kissed me on the forehead.

"That's for nothing," she said. It startled me and perhaps I did draw back a little. She laughed and said, "I'm terribly sorry. I forgot you're a basketball player and I suppose that you're in training."

I tried to explain to her that no harm had been done and that we had finished our season on the previous Saturday defeating the Yale freshmen, our principal rivals, by a score of 33 to 29 in spite of the fact that Yale led 20 to 14 at the end of the first half. I shot three baskets myself. I didn't really have a chance to finish the story because Irving called from down the hall, "Hurry up or we'll miss the trolley at Scollay Square." That was where you caught the last car for Cambridge. The girls lived at the Brewster just around the corner.

We said good-night out on the side walk and Lottie and I stood there in the moonlight and shook hands just as if nothing had happened.