We Were in the Smoking-Room

By William F. Jenkins

HEY say,” remarked Cary, “that when two men come together, they talk of business, but that when there are three or more together, they talk of women.”

He was a motion-picture actor with a singularly perfect profile and a small but well-trained moustache.

I sighed.

“Not always,” I protested out of the depths of my experience; “sometimes they talk of baseball.”

We were in the smoking-room of a liner going down the coast. Besides Cary and myself there were Marden, one of the few great motion-picture actors; Hayne, a lieutenant in our army on his way to Porto Rico; Hamilton, who was an insurance salesman, and “The Old Gent.” “The Old Gent” claimed to have been in the same state of intoxication for thirty-five years, and to have been a friend and intimate of the late Colonel Pat Sheedy. He now spoke up, apropos of nothing in particular.

“Tell you what, Rochester’s a nice town. I took the Keeley cure there twice, but they won’t let me come back, now. I run off with a li'l widow up there. Took her all aroun’ the State. Y’know they can’t do nothin’ to you ’nless you go out of the State.”

We were silent a moment.

“There are women, and women,” observed Marden sagely. “I never knew a woman could appreciate the demands of a man’s profession, until a very little while ago. Not long ago, I was married. My wife loved me,—too much. She hindered my artistic development by her affection. An artist of any sort cannot develop in an atmosphere of perfect comfort. He must suffer to advance. And she loved me. I was degenerating, rapidly becoming one of the mass of film-players who heave once for love, twice for hate, and roll their eyes. I was becoming popular! Can I name a worse fate for an actor?”

“Yes,” remarked Carey, “you might name fat.”

“My wife saw my deterioration. She saw the dimming of my art, the slow approach of self-satisfaction, with its accompaniment of artistic oblivion. She loved me. She knew I loved her. She left me.”

“I don’t understand,” said Hamilton.

“He means,” explained Cary, carefully feeling his moustache, “that she knew he would become mediocre unless he had a shock. She knew that suffering in any form would renew his artistic ability. So she left him, trusting to his emotional suffering to make him once more a great actor.”

He looked gravely at his cigar, without commenting on the accuracy or inaccuracy of Marden’s analysis of her motives. The waiter approached.

“Rye,” said the lieutenant. We all ordered.

“But you never can tell about women,” said Hamilton bromidically. “I had a cousin, once. She married a man named Mor—Maw—I’ve forgotten his name, but she left him because she didn’t like his table manners. She left him, and that was all the explanation she ever gave the family.”

I called to mind a conversation I had had with a charming woman the summer before.

“A woman once told me,” I offered, “that she left her husband because he was everything he should be, and knew it. What was worse, he bragged of it. It got her into some embarrassing predicaments. Imagine being caught kissing her own husband, in a conservatory! It ruined her socially.”

“I knew a woman,” observed Cary, “who left her husband because a man she was in love with would have nothing to do with her. It’s a fact! Her husband was hopelessly conceited, and she fell in love with this other chap. He, er, he is a sort of relative of mine, and asked me to help him out. She wanted him to run off with her—”

“Should of called me in,” said “The Old Gent” genially. “I’d of done it for her.”

The waiter approached.

“Rye,” said the lieutenant. We all ordered.

“My friend wouldn’t run off with her,” said Cary, reflectively. “I don’t know why. He liked the girl all right, only he happened to be in love with one of the extra women at the studio who was badly gone on the star. Quite a funny mix-up. The woman who ran off in love with a man who was in love with another woman who was in love with another man who was married to the first woman. So she ran off by herself. At least I suppose she did. She went to visit her family up in New York State. And when her husband inquired for her, her family said she had left and they didn’t know where she was. Quite close-mouthed about it, they were. I suppose she told them a tale about being abused and all that.”

“The Old Gent” beamed upon us.

“That li'l widow up in Rochester,” he confided, “she wasn’ a regular widow. Jus’ a grass widow. I don’ know what she saw in me,” he wriggled in an attempt at bashfulness, “but she was expensive. She must’ve got two thousan’ out of me, I guess.”

“That woman I was talking about, borrowed five hundred from my—er—relative when she ran off,” said Cary.

I thought of three hundred and fifty “loaned” to my fair confidante of the summer before, and groaned inwardly, but said nothing.

“My cousin,” said Hamilton, the insurance agent, reluctantly, “gathered eight hundred among the members of the family to finance her divorce proceedings.”

The lieutenant put down his latest glass. He had not been listening to our talk.

“Your name is Marden,” he said suddenly to the motion-picture star; “I know your wife. I know where she is. She is getting a divorce. And when she gets a divorce she is going to marry me!”

He strode to the door as Marden gasped.

“What!” Marden exclaimed, “you know where Ella is?”

“The Old Gent” looked up.

“Ella,” he beamed.

Cary started.

“Ella!” he half-shouted at “The Old Gent.”

Hamilton lay back and closed his eyes.

“Ella!” he murmured faintly.

“Ella!” I gulped.

The lieutenant strode out the door. Marden tottered after him, pleading for the whereabouts of his wife. We turned to each other. “The Old Gent” lifted his glass.

“Here’s to Ella,” he said genially.

We drank.